Illusions
by Red Thread Studios
Summary: It's been almost three years after Naruto was presumed KIA when he shows up half-dead at Konoha's gates. When he's assigned to Team 7, they're left to deal with the fallout. Naruto is not the same as he once was and Sakura and Sasuke are no longer sure of where his loyalties lie. Naruto is now playing a dangerous game, and he is desperate to win at (almost) any cost.
1. Chapter 1

**_Illusions_**

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><p>Chapter I: <em>Game Start<em>

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><p><p>It was bitterly cold; the night sky was overcast by thick clouds that obscured even the moonlight. It was the kind of night that had civilians double-locking their doors because they had enough common sense to know that this was the kind of night that sentries ended up missing from their stations on the village walls. The kind of night that half-dead shinobi dragged themselves home, most likely to die before they even reached the hospital or a friendly face. A hand laid heavily upon rough, scratchy bark, leaving a bloody print behind when it retracted to hang limply at its owner's side.****  
><strong>**

The owner himself was a shinobi, not that such a fact was much a surprise; it was, after all, only a few hundred feet from Konoha's wall and the middle of the night. His attire was simple; he wore black clothing with blood-stained bandages wrapped around his wrists and ankles to keep the edges of the cloth from flapping. A regulation shuriken and a kunai holster adorned his right leg, empty. Everything about him was simple and efficient, as was expected; even his unruly blond hair was covered mostly by the bandanna that holds his hitai-ate - it was also black. The only reason he wasn't a textbook example of a Konoha shinobi was the absence of a chūnin vest, his steely, bright blue eyes, and the six whisker marks set into his cheeks.

Well, that and the fact that he was drenched almost head to toe in blood. It was drying between his toes and fingers and caking his shirt and pants, leaving them an unattractive and disturbing brownish-maroon color. Most textbooks didn't like to depict ninja as bloodstained killers.

His mouth was twisted into a hard line that looked strange on his young face as he stared at the gates, tilting his head back slightly. He could ignore most of the pain as long as he didn't shift from side to side - or move at all, actually.

But he couldn't just keep staring at the walls all night. Naruto swallowed and took a step forward -

_ - shit - _

and went down hard on both knees, his hands slamming harshly into the cold ground. Idly, he thought something might have cracked. He could practically hear Genkaku's voice yelling at him in his head - 'don't let your muscles stiffen, you won't be able to move, what is this, the Academy? Get up, brat, didn't your sensei teach you better?' _He didn't have a chance to teach me much at all_, he thought wryly, and finally exhaled slowly. The slow burn on his chest and down his sides had flared up like a banked fire; he gritted his teeth and thought, _I've felt worse, I've been in worse, almost there, I'm almost -_

_Fuck_. He took another deep breath and braced himself on his arms, closing his eyes. The night air bit at his lungs; he didn't remember it ever being this cold in Konoha before. _Well, you learn new things every day_. Naruto thought about the dog tags lying innocently in his pocket and his resolve strengthened again, just as he knew it would. _Come on__,_ he snarled mentally, this is pathetic. _Pick yourself up off the fucking ground - you're almost there. Almost there._

He inhaled once more and carefully, carefully sat up on his heels. Pain sent black spots swarming through his vision; he shut his eyes and counted to ten, then twenty when that didn't help. Eventually he stood up. _Fuck, I need a cane or something._

As he approached the gate, he heard one of the chūnin on guard say something in a surprised voice to the other and he would have snarled at them if he'd had the energy. And they can't see me just a few feet to the side, in the trees, practically writhing in pain? Idiots. Genkaku would've had their heads for such an amateur move. "Finally noticed me, didja?" he rasped out, surprised at how hoarse and utterly pissed his voice sounded.

At that, the two chūnin blurred into action, and Naruto was rather annoyed that his exhausted eyes couldn't keep up with their movements; his eyes pulsed painfully and for a moment he couldn't see anything at all until he shook his head firmly. Their voices mixed together into a nonsensical mishmash of words and everything went black.

* * *

><p>"Is he - ?"<p>

"Shit, that's a lot - !"

"- kage-sama!"

" - you sure that's - ?"

"I honestly don't know, Kakashi-san, but we'll - "

"- do fucking better then try!"

Naruto found himself amused by the fact that Kakashi was expelling such a huge amount of anger over little old him. Hell, he hadn't even seen the man in - what, four years? No, three. Still. It felt like a lifetime; he tried to recall the man's face and remembered, for the first time in months, that damn cloth mask he'd always worn over it. He wondered for the first time if that wasn't something left over from his ANBU days; maybe Kakashi missed the mask. Now that he was in Konoha again, he could ask him... holy _shit._

He was in Konoha.

Naruto jerked and his eyes flew open. The bright fluorescent lights shot straight into his eyes and seemed to pierce his brain; he groaned and turned his head to the side, shutting his eyes once more. His throat hurt; probably from too much screaming. Torture tended do that to a guy.

"You're awake."

It was a statement, not a question, but it felt like one. "Yeah," he said anyways, for lack of anything better, then he opened his eyes to see who the hell he was talking to.

A face mostly covered by a black cloth mask greeted his. It was achingly familiar; that single grey-black eye, drooping and unconcerned, that tilted hitai-ate, that silver hair, sticking defiantly straight up in the air. "Kakashi-sensei," he said, "hi."

Kakashi swallowed. It was an unusual display of emotion that (tells many things - remember this, Naruto, body language is important - ) Naruto hadn't expected. His memories of Kakashi were of an apathetic, slouching man, an orange book in one hand and his one eye fixed on it while he absently doled out criticism after criticism, and smiled very slightly at their achievements. So, not the best sensei in the world, but he remembered Genkaku telling them stories about Sharingan no Kakashi, possibly one of the most skilled shinobi that ANBU had ever had in its ranks. Not the best sensei, but a damn good ninja.

Or maybe Kakashi actually had cared about his students? It was starting to look like that, as Kakashi's eye had gone from lazy to alert in the space of about a millisecond when he'd seen Naruto had wake up, and was now trained on Naruto's face like he was trying to memorize every centimeter of it. Which was kind of weird, and vaguely creepy, but nice.

"Welcome home, Naruto," the man said finally. His voice sounded more like the Kakashi Naruto was used to; straight to the point and bored-sounding.

"Thanks," Naruto rasped, laughing weakly. The chuckle quickly morphed into a fit of harsh, wracking coughs that shook his whole body. He was still weak, from both the torture and unleashing a great deal of the Kyūbi's power.

There was another pause, and Naruto didn't need Genkaku's training to know that Kakashi didn't know what to say; there was something on the tip of his tongue, but he was unsure of how to put it into words. But then, what are you supposed to say to your student who had been gone for the past three years, and oh, by the way, none of his teammates survived?

After an unbearably awkward pause that Naruto spent wishing that he was still unconscious for, Kakashi stood up. "I'll tell Sakura and Sasuke you're awake," he said quietly, and for a second it seemed like he was going to touch Naruto's cheek or pat his head or something, until he turned and left. Naruto settled down against the pillows and stared at the ceiling, trying not to think.

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><p>Sasuke and Sakura were sparring on one of the training fields when Kakashi found them. Sasuke first noticed him standing to the side, looking off to the side absently and leaning against a tree, while he caught his breath after flipping Sakura back a couple dozen feet. He heard her wheezing, trying to get her breath back, and decided it was payback for the mild poison burning in his arm, which would limit mobility for a couple of hours. Sakura didn't use the heavy stuff when training, but it still hurt like a bitch.<p>

There were senbon littered around him, dark with his blood; he left them there for Sakura to pick up and stalked over to the side, wiping the blade of his sword on a ripped-off piece of his mostly destroyed shirt. _Damnit__,_ he thought, staring disgustedly at the tatters hanging off his torso, _that was my best one._ He tore off another sleeve before the acid soaking it could eat into his arm, and eyed Kakashi. Kakashi looked back, amused. "Remember when you thought Sakura was weak?"

"Shut up, old man," Sasuke muttered, and shrugged past him, starting towards his apartment. "Naruto's awake," said Kakashi, and Sasuke froze.

"What," he said, turning around and fixing the man with a hard look, his tone completely lacking inflection.

"Wha'?" Sakura came up, her hands full of senbon and a few clenched in her teeth. Sasuke glared at her and hoped that she swallowed some of her own poison. He knew it wouldn't matter even if she did, though, because Sakura had spent time slowly building up an immunity to her poisons. Maybe she could ingest acid. That would be painful. The sting in his arm flared up as if in response.

Sakura spat the senbon out and repeated, "What?" more clearly. She dropped the rest on the grass and tugged her shirt into place, before kneeling and starting to clean them with a cloth from her belt pouch.

"Naruto's awake," Sasuke muttered, watching her bloody hands still and her head snap back.

"Really?" She sounded inordinately excited, Sasuke thought, considering how she hadn't actually _liked_ Naruto when he was a part of their team.

"Yep," said Kakashi, and glanced up at the sun. "Where's Sai?"

Sakura snorted, gathering up her needles. "Who cares?" she muttered, shoving them into various places about her person. She glanced up, eyes bright, and squealed, "Naruto's awake!" Then she took off at a run for Konoha General Hospital, grinning. Sasuke and Kakashi watched her go.

"Aren't you going with her?" asked Kakashi.

Sasuke shrugged brusquely. "I'll go later," he said, "when she's not so hyperactive."

Kakashi glanced down at him, unreadable, before shrugging as well and giving him a slightly mocking salute. "Here, tomorrow, at eight thirty five." Sasuke nodded, knowing that Kakashi expected him to somehow relay this information to Sakura as well, and then started walking to his apartment.

So, he thought, Naruto's back. Somehow this fact hadn't really sunk in since last night, when he'd been brought in, unconscious and badly injured, by the idiot chūnin currently managing the gate. Sasuke snorted at the thought; manning the gate was a task given to ninja who were either injured but not bedridden, or too plain stupid to be sent out in the field, and had only passed the Chūnin Exams by getting opponents even more intellectually challenged than they were. The pair now on duty fell into the latter category. Well, there was also Kotetsu and Izumo, the Godaime's dogs, but they didn't really count.

He wasn't quite sure what to think of Naruto's return. After all, he hadn't seen the other since they were both - what, thirteen or something? Three years. They had gotten another teammate to fill the empty position, and he honestly hadn't given Naruto much thought for a year or so. Sasuke had presumed him dead - though he'd never voiced this thought to Sakura, who had been inconsolable for months on end - after the first half-year, and tried very very hard to put him out of his mind after that. He'd stuck all the memories in the little cranny of his heart where all his dead went, next to stern-faced Uchihas and older brothers full of promises about "tomorrow", and moved on. Kind of.

Mostly.

...He wasn't expecting Naruto to come back, was the point. Wasn't expecting it, and didn't really know how to react now that he was back. Sasuke figured he should probably go see him before he got out of the hospital. Sakura would probably be pissed if he didn't - either that, or she would give him that strange, surprised look, edged with pity, like she'd finally figured out that Sasuke was kind of a fucked up human being, and be very nice to him for the next couple days. Until he did something else to piss her off.

Sometimes he regretted the fact that Sakura had gotten over her crush. It'd had perks, one of them being that he'd never met the wrong end of Sakura's fist.

He finally raised his head and looked around, realizing he'd passed his apartment. Grumbling to himself, he turned around and jogged back, fumbling for the keys in his pocket and hoping they hadn't fallen out. His arm stung, and a long, shallow cut on his leg decided to make itself known with bright flares of pain that made his vision go white every time he put weight on the leg. He focused and finally managed to get the key in the lock; opening the door, he stumbled inside, slammed the door and went straight into the bathroom, showering to wash the sweat and blood off, then getting the first aid kit out and cleaning his cuts, bandaging the worst ones. He'd guilt-trip Sakura into healing them properly later.

That done, he flung himself on the bed and pillowed his head with his arms. He'd moved to this apartment a year or so ago - Sakura had started giving him those looks and gently suggesting a move after she realized he still lived in the Uchiha compound, and, well, wasn't like Sasuke was stupid. Staying in that house might not be the healthiest thing in the world, and the Godaime had started making hints about using the empty houses in the compound for something. He didn't want to stay and see grubby civilian children running down the same streets where Itachi had once carried him on his back. He still wasn't used to the apartment, though. He hated the feel of the still, dead air inside it; the ceiling fan that he routinely forgot to turn off rotated lazily above his head. He stared at the circling spokes and the cracks in the off-white ceiling, and had the brief thought that his very clean, very high-class mother would probably have a minor cardiac arrest if she ever saw where he lived now. The houses in the Uchiha compound had all been designed for natural ventilation; Sasuke hadn't had an electric fan while growing up.

He sat up so quickly that his head swam and clenched his teeth. Naruto's return was dredging up old memories, it seemed. _Enough__,_ he told himself, and went to go find something to eat.

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><p>The next couple of hours were incredibly awkward. All of the Rookie Nine, as they had once been known, had come to visit except for Sasuke. It was clear they had all long since buried Uzumaki Naruto. He couldn't really blame them, though; ever since Genkaku's death, he had believed he would not complete the mission alive. Yet here he was, sitting safe and sound in Konoha's hospital. He didn't really know what to say either; somewhere between watching Genkaku coolly slaughter one of the nukenin's daughters and seeing the blade of a sword appear, like magic, through his chest, he'd slowly forced down the memory of Konoha until he could go entire weeks without thinking the name.<p>It wasn't like he could blame them for changing and moving on. He was no longer naive enough to believe things would go back to the way they used to be.****  
><strong>**

Naruto could still remember the sick jolt of hopelessness, like someone had snapped a thread in his soul, when he'd woken up in that dark cell and listened to the one teammate he had left scream until her vocal cords had become tattered and raw and they'd thrown Tomoko's broken body in with Naruto hours later.

_"Please, stop! Stop!"_

_"Now now, stop complaining. Wouldn't want to let such beauty go to waste, right?"_

Naruto's hands slammed down onto his skull, weaving fingers through his hair and digging nails into his scalp to silence the clamoring voices of his memories.

"Naruto!" Sakura exclaimed. "Are you okay?"

Naruto managed a lopsided grin. "I'm okay, Sakura-chan. Just a headache."

"Okay, if you're sure..." Sakura frowned. She looked out the window and started slightly. "Guys, visiting hours are over! It's time for us to leave and let Naruto get some sleep."

After a momentary chorus of grumbles and goodbyes, Naruto was left alone again. He allowed himself to collapse on to his pillow.

They had changed. He had changed. They had moved on. His goals were no longer in their best interests.

But really, none of that mattered. The board was set and the pieces were ready to move.

The reward for winning the game?

Salvation.

Failure meant not death -

- but deletion.

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><p><em>AN:_ So this fic is Yukihana Hisako's brainchild, but after a while we realized that twenty fingers were better than two and now I (misssilivren) am her writing-partner. So, yes, this is a collab.

Another thing that we're both painfully aware of is that there are waaay too many Super!Naruto fics out there. We'll try to make Naruto, y'know, flawed and human and things, but please feel free to tell us when you think out characterization is off or something. ...Keeping in mind that neither of us are actually Kishimoto. And this is a fanfiction.

We'll try to keep updates semi-regular, and since there are two writers involved, there probably won't be any hiatuses. Then again, we have no idea how long this thing is going to be - I was surprised that plot even decided to show it's smug face...

When the story really gets going there will be teasers and extras available over at my (misssilivren's) LJ. You can find the link in my profile; you can find the link for that on the RTS page.

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>Genkaku: Hallucination<p><p> 


	2. Chapter 2

**_Illusions_**

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><p>Chapter II: <em>Then and Now<em>

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><p>Sasuke had been in worse situations then this before - forced to watch his family die over and over again in the depths of Itachi's Tsukiyomi; a rush of instinct and adrenaline and finding himself, almost by accident, in front of Naruto and feeling the sting of needles drive through him - but he had always known what to do, what was coming. He couldn't honestly say that he had ever not known what to do next. (Because Sasuke was an Uchiha and Uchihas always knew what to do, but -)<p>

But.

This time he didn't.

The situation felt eerily familiar - leaning stiffly against the railing of the bridge, Sakura a little ways away from him and Naruto slumped haphazardly opposite him. Sai was gone, put in charge of Team 8 as a replacement for the pregnant Kurenai. Well, Naruto wasn't running his mouth off, so it wasn't exactly the same. But still. Naruto was wearing an orange jumpsuit again, although the blue parts had been replaced with black and that ridiculous collar was gone. Even with the black bandanna hitai-ate covering his hair, it still felt like nothing had changed. As if they were still teammates, still friends, and still trusted each other with their lives. Sasuke had no qualms about letting Sakura or Kakashi at his back, but Naruto...

Naruto had changed, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore. Even Sakura had started to look a bit tense around the edges - her expressions were more guarded, her muscles tight; she kept Naruto to her front. It probably wasn't conscious - Sakura wouldn't intentionally defend against Naruto when he wasn't even doing anything - but the fact that it was instinct was more worrying, because it meant that maybe she was right about being cautious. She looked like she was preparing for an attack.

Sure, on the surface Naruto seemed the same; he still grinned, laughed, wore orange, and made a fool of himself, but there was something...different. His eyes were more alert - he looked at Sasuke in a way that made him uncomfortable. Assessing. Teammates were not supposed to assess each other, unless it was to give each other tips on how to improve. Teammates were not supposed to look at each other like enemies, but everything about Naruto - the way his hands always hovered close to his sides, where he could see two out-of-place imprints on the insides of his sleeves, the way he was standing, deceptively casual in a way that reminded him achingly of Kakashi- screamed distrust. And why was Naruto picking up Kakashi's mannerisms anyways? Only ANBU stood like that -

Oh.

Sasuke suddenly felt a bit stupid. They hadn't been told much about Naruto's mission - which meant that it had been classified, and long-term. The only shinobi sent on those kinds of missions were high-ranking jōnin and ANBU, and Sasuke would have noticed if three jōnin had gone missing for three years. Which, of course, only left ANBU. Naruto had been living with ANBU for three years; Sasuke felt a jolt of envy and horror.

Envy because obviously Naruto had obviously been trained by ANBU for the past three years, and dammit, Sasuke had only been a jōnin for three months. But... he remembered how Itachi had changed after he'd gone into ANBU; he'd smiled less (not that he'd been the most cheerful person before) and pushed Sasuke away more. It had been like he felt like he was contaminating Sasuke, or something; looking back Sasuke knew that it was just Itachi formulating his plan to kill the clan, but it hadn't felt like it back then. It had felt like ANBU had stolen his brother away and replaced him with a porcelain-faced person in an anonymous uniform, and some part of him still hated those masks.

Besides, everyone knew ex-ANBU were jacked up in the head; Kakashi was a living example. And all right, Sasuke wasn't exactly a perfect picture of mental health (he was pretty sure any psychologist would rule his fixation with killing his brother more than a little unstable), but he wasn't like them. They wouldn't flinch at eradicating a clan. Would Naruto?

The blond dobe he remembered was convinced of the good in everybody; wanted to be Hokage, wanted Sasuke to acknowledge him, wanted Kakashi's recognition, wanted to date Sakura - was an immature little kid, basically. Sasuke wasn't sure he liked this new version better, though.

This Uzumaki Naruto was dangerous, deadly. Probably ruthless. _Like Itachi,_ some part of his mind commented neutrally, almost resignedly.

(Itachi's changes had been much like Naruto's, after all - less laughter, more lies, less love, more death.)

But would Naruto really massacre a whole family in cold blood?

_If it served to further his motives -_ he thought, and didn't let the sentence go farther than that.

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><p>Sasuke was glaring at Naruto.<p>

Sasuke was _glaring_ at Naruto. This wasn't anything new for him, but it was kind of unsettling. Wasn't Sasuke supposed to be... nicer to him? Since he had only just returned, after a three-year stint away from Konoha? ...And everyone had thought he was dead? Then again, when had he known Sasuke to be nice to anyone? His deplorably asshole-ish and bastardly attitude had only gotten worse; the only person he would talk to was Sakura.

Which was a surprise in and of itself, seeing as how he couldn't stand her before Naruto had left. Maybe Sakura had finally gotten through to him. Maybe they were dating now. ...Ugh, he hoped they weren't dating - but he didn't like Sakura anymore, right? He eyed her sidelong; she was staring straight ahead at nothing, light green eyes unfocused. Her hair was the same shade of coral, and short; it framed a face that was more than a little pretty. She'd grown into her forehead at last, it seemed; there were a light dusting of freckles across her nose. Okay, so she wasn't hot, exactly - but she was really pretty. Sasuke shouldn't get everything, after all. There still wasn't a vaguely familiar flutter in his chest when he looked at Sakura. He looked away, frowning, inspected a cloud, and then shrugged mentally. He knew as well as anyone that dating inside a team wasn't advised. If it didn't work out, the dynamics would be screwed up for weeks, possibly months after - and a team of shinobi liable to be sent on high-risk missions couldn't afford to function like anything less than a well-oiled machine. That didn't really explain the little jump of dismay at the thought of Sasuke and Sakura being Sasuke & Sakura, but... if you can't figure it out, let it go; it'll come to you. Genkaku had been full of sage-like bullshit like that, delivered sardonically from behind a panther mask.

Naruto could count on one hand how many times he'd seen Genkaku's bare face; three times when he'd woken in the middle of the night, Kyūbi's deep, rasping voice echoing in his head, turned his head and saw the team leader sleeping next to him. He had never been able to look away immediately: the sight of an exposed face seemed shockingly vulnerable after weeks of being surrounded by masks, the sight of Genkaku's most of all. After a moment he'd glance away, feeling like an intruder, then turn his back and try to fall back asleep. The fourth time had been when he'd ripped hard, blood-splattered porcelain off of Genkaku's face, searching frantically for breath after a pulse had evaded him.

He never understood it when people said that dead people looked like they were sleeping, or peaceful, or something equally stupid. Genkaku hadn't looked like he was enjoying the afterlife or burning in hell, hadn't looked like he was sleeping or just momentarily closing his eyes. He looked dead, and that was simply that.

Naruto was snapped out of his trip down memory lane when a soft pop notified him of a new arrival via shunshin.

"Hello, my adorable students! Sorry I'm late - I got held up by an anaconda attacking two helpless civilian children. She was vicious and possibly rabid, and unfortunately I had to make a detour to the hospital to get the poison removed," Kakashi chirped as he took a couple of steps towards the members of his team.

"Kakashi-sensei, anacondas aren't poisonous. Can't you be honest for once?" Sakura grumbled as she crossed her arms over her chest.

"I do tell the truth occasionally, Sakura!" Kakashi defended. "I told you when Naruto was awake, didn't I?"

Sakura just glared in response.

Kakashi let out a nervous chuckle before he continued speaking. "I actually only need Naruto here for today, so you two can leave."

Sasuke's glare strengthened and Sakura's hands clenched into fists. Apparently Kakashi took this as a silent refusal to go, as he offered no more protests against their presence.

They all walked to the training field in silence. Once there, Sasuke and Sakura went to stand off over to the side, leaning against the fence. Sasuke's head was down and he looked the picture of disinterest, but Sakura was looking straight at him, eyes narrowed. Naruto felt a shiver run up his spine at her gaze; he turned his back to her despite his instincts screaming at him not to, and focused on Kakashi.

At least Kakashi had deigned to put away his porn and reveal his Sharingan. Naruto quelled any hope that he might win; he had little illusions about himself when it came to Sharingan no Kakashi. He'd try his damnedest not to let Kakashi put him in the hospital and attempt to land some hits on his weak spots, and that was pretty much all he could do.

Naruto gritted his teeth, and prepared for a beating.

"You know the drill," Kakashi said as he pulled a singled bell from his pocket. "All you have to do is take this bell, but -"

"I'll have to come at you like I mean to kill if I want to succeed, right, sensei?" Naruto interrupted with a grin.

"Exactly."

Naruto crouched lightly on the ground, keeping himself perfectly balanced, ready to move with almost zero notice. Kakashi's one visible eye narrowed, and his hand moved towards his kunai pouch.

"And...start," Kakashi announced quietly.

Naruto's hand immediately lashed out in a wide arc, sending four shuriken towards the silver-haired jōnin. Kakashi even didn't blink before he vaporized into a cloud of smoke. Just a normal bunshin, Naruto realized with a grimace when he felt only a small amount of chakra released from the copy. _So where is he now...?_ Naruto concentrated for a moment before he let out a weak pulse of chakra-enhanced wind. If Kakashi was abovegound, he would be within range of the pulse. Any farther and Kakashi would loose the ability to track Naruto's movements, which went against everything the ANBU drilled into its shinobi's heads. So when the wind swept over the training grounds uninterrupted, Naruto knew that the only place Kakashi could be was underground.

Naruto backed up a couple of steps and then pulled out a kunai which he quickly infused with wind-natured chakra with the ease of many hours of practice. It only took him a couple of seconds to complete the process. When he was done, he threw the kunai towards the center of the clearing, where it lodged in the ground before the chakra infused into the kunai exploded outward in dozens of invisible blades, causing the ground to crack and shatter.

Kakashi shot of his underground hiding place and into the air. Naruto immediately sent another volley of kunai at him in response, all of which Kakashi successfully deflected with little thought or effort.

As soon as Kakashi reached ground again his hands started flying through seals too fast for Naruto to follow. The moment he was done, Kakashi inhaled before exhaling a perfect fireball, which scorched the air where Naruto had been a moment before. Naruto's legs ached from his quick jump away; he scowled and slapped a sloppy concealing genjutsu over himself - basically a version of the Nara's kagegakure - that Genkaku had taught him. It wasn't very good, but it would buy him some time. Naruto silently retreated into the trees, feeling a bit safer out of the open. Being exposed from all sides like that had left him jittery from the second he'd stepped out of the hospital; it was a relief to be back in the green shade of the forest, branches criss-crossing above him to leave only slivers of achingly blue sky visible. Naruto licked his lips and sat in a comfortable position that would allow him to get up easily, between a bush and a tree. He closed his eyes and felt for the flow of chakra in Kakashi's body. It took less than a second to locate; the former ANBU wasn't trying particularly hard to mask it, probably because he didn't expect Naruto to be able to threaten him with genjutsu, of all things. Naruto smirked and released a wave of chakra-infused wind, which blew gently through the trees and towards Kakashi. Then, concentrating, he carefully manipulated the signals passing through Kakashi's optic nerve using the small amounts of Naruto's chakra the older shinobi's body had absorbed from Naruto's wind pulse. Once that chakra was connected to the hippocampus and other parts of the brain central to long-term memory and an emotion was put into it - fear - Naruto allowed the genjutsu to run its course.

Naruto had no hopes that a mere _magen: narakumi no jutsu _would distract Kakashi for any longer then a couple of seconds at most, but it was likely that the jōnin would leave at least a small opening, and that was Naruto's true aim. That was all genjutsu was, after all; a way to create an opening.

And Kakashi, did, indeed, leave himself open, if only momentarily. His lone visible eye widened slightly, and his relaxed posture tensed.

That was all Naruto needed to jump in. He slipped his dual tantō out of their sheaths with the lightning-fast speed of a maneuver practiced thousands upon thousands of times. He jumped up and rushed towards Kakashi, striking out at the same time with both daggers. Kakashi avoided Naruto's blades and retaliated with a clean, painful punch to the stomach that sent Naruto flying backwards.

In midair, Naruto took control of his flight by creating a kage bunshin that grabbed him and allowed the original Naruto to flip over and land on his feet. Even before Naruto had reached ground again, Kakashi had rushed forward, prepared with a vicious side kick. Naruto only barely managed to avoid it by dropping to the ground and rolling away.

The instant Kakashi realized that his kick would not connect, he began a series of hand seals so fast that they were a blur to Naruto's eyes. Suddenly, Kakashi's chakra spiked in the ground underneath Naruto. Naruto's eyes widened in shock before he pushed himself into the air with one arm and molded wind chakra into his daggers, extending their reach by several feet by molding his chakra into dagger-like shapes. Naruto swung his arms outwards in an arc as sharp, dangerous stone spikes rose up from the ground, slicing off the tips of the ones closest to him. His foot found purchase on the flattened tip of one of the spikes and he leaped up on to a low tree branch. Kakashi was on him in moments with a calculated flurry of taijutsu. Naruto some of the attacks and used his demonic stamina to absorb the ones he couldn't avoid. But then Kakashi pulled his fist back and charged it with lightning-natured chakra, causing electricity to leap and dance around his hand. A moment later, the very same fist was buried in Naruto's face, sending him flying backwards, excruciating tingles of pain racing through his head and neck.

Naruto rolled as he landed to lessen the force of the impact and jumped on to his feet. As soon as he looked up, a faint red glow caught his eye. He swung his head around to get a closer look. It was a modified explosive tag, with the quadrants connected to three other seal tags -

_Fuck._

As soon as Naruto realized what it was, he started running. But he wasn't fast enough; the explosion detonated around him in a disturbingly beautiful plume of light and smoke. The loud boom of the release of energy deafened and dazed him, and the fact that he was sent crashing to the ground in a haphazard heap certainly didn't help. By the time he finally had the sense of self to open his eyes and try to get up, Kakashi was standing over him, eyes curled up into a cheery smile and holding the steel kunai tickling Naruto's neck.

Of course Naruto had expected to loose, but it still stung. Blood trickled down his temple; he wiped it away with tanned fingers and spat to the side, his mouth tasting like mud and electricity. _Damn Kakashi,_ he thought grouchily, and limped over to the fence, where Sasuke and Sakura stood. Sakura's half-smirk was trained on the ground; Sasuke's firmest poker face was on but there was a hint of amusement around his eyes. He glanced at Naruto and visibly stopped himself from smirking as well. "Laugh it up while you can," Naruto grumped childishly, "soon I'll be wiping the floor with his senile ass, you watch."

Sakura gave up and laughed, her posture easing; he grinned alongside her, feeling suddenly relaxed, despite the short stabs of pain that radiated up from his chest every now and then, like his ribcage needed to make sure he didn't forget about the nasty bruise that was forming. The faint amusement on Sasuke's face slid off; he looked abruptly uncomfortable, and walked forwards to meet Kakashi at the center of the field, since it seemed Kakashi himself wasn't going to come to them. Naruto blinked at him, wondering what his problem was, and then busied himself with reacquainting himself with Sakura. It wouldn't do to let anyone think that he had changed on the mission.

* * *

><p>Sakura lifted herself out of the dirt, face forced into a rictus snarl, and launched herself out of the way of another volley of shuriken. One slammed into the ground perilously close to her foot; she recognized the small notch in one of the blades, one that she'd seen Sasuke patiently carve into his shuriken countless times, a way to identify them after a battle. It was one of those silent ninja-codes that everyone had seemed to know except her, to never take an enemy's weapon off a battlefield, and Sasuke never liked leaving anything behind on a mission. She registered, somehow, something flying through through the air behind her; she thumped down hard on her knees to avoid a kunai arcing over her shoulder. <em>Move<em>, she told herself sternly, and leapt away.

She had to admit, she hadn't expected quite this much of a fight when Kakashi had told them that they were going to spar against one another. Honestly, she'd expected to mostly have to focus her attention on Sasuke; he was always a difficult opponent, despite the fact that she won at least half of their matches. She counted every graze on his skin as a victory. But, as it turned out, Naruto had gotten exponentially better on his three-year stint away from the village. Sakura hung back from the fight, retreating into the trees for a moment to observe her teammates. Her muscles quivered with energy and exhaustion; she'd ache tomorrow, she knew.

Absently fingering a senbon, Sakura peered through the leaves, crouched low, at Sasuke and Naruto. At some point, one of them had abandoned long-distance attacks and they were now fighting at close range, a blur of taijutsu, fire and steel. Her eyes narrowed, trying to track their movements; Sasuke's slight height was an advantage, but Naruto had more in terms of sheer power. He could send Sasuke back spinning with a single punch, and she caught herself admiring his technique. _Stop that,_ she told herself, and returned to her analytical frame of mind. As always, they had forgotten completely about her, and observing them now would give her a better idea of their weaknesses and strengths. She hadn't had much opportunity to watch Sasuke in action, and she hadn't seen Naruto in over three years.

After a moment more of watching, Sakura tensed, ready to re-enter the fray, when she paused. Thin brows knitted together; something had changed. Naruto hung back a moment, an unfamiliar, dark smirk on his face, and then plunged back in as Sasuke swung wildly, seeming off-balance. She blinked as he stumbled back; Sasuke wasn't normally so clumsy. Naruto darted in, a quick, vicious punch to the stomach making Sasuke bend over briefly before he overcame his reaction and straightened up. Naruto smoothly danced out of reach of the other's punch, darting around behind Sasuke, where Sakura couldn't see. The Uchiha pulled back, seemingly confused, before Naruto did something to make him tilt forwards, slamming hard to his knees. Sasuke put a hand to his eyes, then whirled around, still kneeling, and hooked a hand 'round Naruto's knee, sending him sprawling. Sakura blinked, then sat back, smirking. It seemed as though Naruto had somehow found a way to divest Sasuke of his sight, temporarily. _Through genjutsu?_ Sakura wondered, then discarded the thought. Naruto could never attain the control it took to weave a successful genjutsu; his chakra was simply too strong to achieve the delicacy required. It must be something else; perhaps a trick one of his ANBU teammates had taught him. Whatever it was, Sakura was enjoying seeing it's effects on Sasuke. Sakura had warned him, time and time again, to quit relying so much on his Sharingan, but of course he had never listened. Now, maybe, without his precious eyes, he'd take her advice.

And he'd had it coming, anyway. Sasuke was a vicious fighter, and Sakura still ached in places from earlier spars. Yet, when she looked back at Sasuke, on his knees and vulnerable, back to the enemy, anxiety stung through her veins. She didn't like seeing Naruto take Sasuke down so easily, though she knew if it were Kakashi she'd have no qualms about enjoying the sight. Her mouth tightened as she watched Sasuke go sprawling, Naruto leaping out of the way when Sasuke got up and lunged for him. Naruto'd had ample opportunities to end the fight by knocking Sasuke out or putting a kunai to his neck; now it felt less like a training session and more like humiliation for it's own sake. _That's enough_, she decided, and got up again.

The senbon previously held loosely between her fingers darted through the air, grazing Naruto's neck. She could hear Naruto swear loudly, one hand clapping the thin, deep scratch. He swung around - she flinched, hard and instinctive, at his narrowed red gaze sweeping the trees where she hid. Shit, she thought, and pulled back, careful not to rustle a single leaf. Safely out of his line of sight, she leaped up into the treetops, feeling wood beneath her shoes as she silently made her way around the training field. When she thought she had gone far enough, she slipped out of the trees and saw Naruto's back, peering at the forest. She smiled, hard and satisfied, and flung a kunai at his back. It whistled through the air; Naruto jerked and turned, clumsily deflecting the blade away from his face with his bare hands. Blood dripped down from his fingers. He met her eyes and grinned, and she locked a shudder deep down. Her hand strayed, almost absently, to a pouch by her side, full of shining senbon, rarely used, thinly coated in poisons that had no cure. She took a breath and stopped herself from sending one flying at Naruto's chest; he was her teammate. Not an enemy, she reminded herself, and then didn't have time to think at all because Naruto's fist was plowing into her stomach.

There was the vague half-thought of _how did he get so fast_ before she rolled away, placing her hands on the ground and aiming a kick at his side. Her foot was met with his hand, and he flung her away with a viciousness that rattled her bones and shocked her. Even Sasuke didn't toss her around that hard when they sparred, and something hardened in her chest. He needs to be taken down a notch, she decided, and got up from the ground.

Sakura's biggest problem with taijutsu was movability. If someone so much as pushed her, she'd go flying back; somehow in the Academy she'd missed the lesson about how to center herself, dig her heels into the ground and fight back. Instead she just went flipping around like a acrobat. Part of it was just her body's natural design - Sakura wasn't the tallest person in the world, and her slenderness was a liability in this matter - but part of it was how she was raised, that little civilian shock of fear when a fist came near her body. But she was resourceful, and she had found a way to turn that to her advantage.

For the next few m inutes she entertained herself by neatly avoiding Naruto, using his own strength against him to push herself back, away, over and out. Naruto was fast, but he wasn't as fast as her - and she had her own secret weapon. She kept out of his way, and waiting for the break in his defense.

It came soon enough; he was getting irritated and therefore sloppy. Sakura gathered her chakra around her fist and darted around his slow but powerful kick at her side. She felt his hand grab her waist to do something painful and sent her fist crashing into his rib before he could. Naruto went flying back and slammed against a tree with a sickening crack. She flinched on reflex and caught her breath, cataloguing her aches and pains efficiently. Nothing seemed broken, but her ankle was sprained. She sighed and turned, belatedly wondering where Sasuke was.

She spotted him leaning against a tree after a moment, arms crossed in a classic Sasuke-pose that had once made her squeal. The only thing left to complete the look was the lowered head, but Sasuke was looking somewhere past her, his gaze burning with anger. Sakura turned and saw Naruto walking towards her, rubbing the back of his head and smiling ruefully. "You got me pretty bad, eh, Sakura-chan?" He grinned, and she thought about Sasuke's fury-darkened eyes with an impending sense of dread.

* * *

><p><em>AN_:New chapter will hopefully go up by 2/4. Remember - it takes hours to write, and only seconds to review!


	3. Chapter 3

_**Illusions**_

* * *

><p><em>Chapter III:<em> Paradigm Shift

* * *

><p>Naruto started walking towards the fence, trying not to limp too obviously, Sakura moving quickly before him. He hadn't made the mistake of underestimating Sakura when he returned to the village - there were new curves of muscle under her skin, and her long artisan's fingers had become scarred and calloused - but he hadn't expected to be quite so soundly thrashed. His pride throbbed even more than his body. He mocked himself inwardly; training with ANBU away from his peers had obviously left him arrogant and overconfident. Well, now that he knew that he could remedy it. He would be more cautious in the next match.<p>

And, he forced himself to admit, he had gotten carried away with Sasuke. Some childish part of him, smarting from the distrustful looks his former teammate had been giving him, had taken over during the fight. He wasn't going to win any friends by being petty and humiliating people. Maybe he should apologize, but even the mere thought of that made him shudder. Eurgh. Nah, Sasuke's bad mood would blow over. And would it probably do him good, being beaten. Naruto had practically felt Sasuke's ego fill up the hospital room when he'd (finally) come to visit Naruto a couple days ago.

He raised his head, approaching Kakashi and Sakura. He saw with some surprise that someone else was standing next to his old sensei. The girl - no, not girl, she was too old for that - young woman looked shockingly similar to Sakura. Her hair was white, with red streaked through it; her eyes were a darker green than Sakura's and glittered with the same keen intelligence; their noses were the same delicate shape, and their cheekbones were both high and proud. The woman's forehead was a bit larger than normal, as well; her hair was swept over it, the bright red and stark white against the light peach of her skin, a few shades lighter than Sakura's. Sakura was attractive in a girlish kind of way; this woman, whoever she was, was boldly beautiful. Naruto didn't register this right away; he was too busy looking at her posture, the way her feet were placed on the ground, her bare forehead, and thinking, _Civilian._ Wealthy civilian, related to Sakura, not old enough to be her mother - most likely her sister; the resemblance was way too close for them to be cousins.

Sakura confirmed that when she said, "Naruto, this is my sister. Chika." He glanced at her, frowning slightly at her tone - Sakura sounded a bit resentful. _She doesn't like admitting that she has a civilian sister_, he realized, _that's why I've never even heard of her before._ Well, that was interesting. Something he could use later? Perhaps, he allowed, and mentally filed the information away in his mind. He smiled, bright and unreserved.

"Nice to meet you! I'm Naruto - I never knew Sakura had a sister!" He turned his gaze to his erstwhile teammate. "You've been holding out on us," he teased.

Sakura flushed and Chika's expression went a bit cool as she glanced at her sister. "Well," she said, "you know Sakura. I hear you've been gone a while; welcome back to the village, Naruto." Her voice was low and smooth, commanding attention even with that simple sentence. The voice of someone who was used to being in authority, and knew how to get it. She looked him up and down discreetly, and when she met his eyes again there was a spark of appreciation in her gaze. Naruto smirked and eased his posture. Now _here_ was something he could work with.

* * *

><p>Sakura darted a glance at her sister and felt her lip almost curl. Seriously? <em>Naruto<em>? Chika was going for _Naruto_?

Not that Naruto was unattractive. But really. Chika had to be, like, five years older than him! And if they started dating, she would never be able to get away from her sister, _ever._

She watched in acute horror as a smirk unfurled over Naruto's features. For a second he even looked halfway attractive, she thought scornfully. Chika certainly seemed to think so; her voice went low and sultry while she struck up some conversation about the the past year's politics that Sakura had exactly zero interest in.

Disgusted, she turned on her heel and stalked away. Sasuke was slowly crossing the training ground, jaw clenched tight and eyes burning holes into Naruto's back. "Here," she murmured, worry erasing other thoughts for a moment, "let me help with that."

Sasuke jerked away from her green-wreathed hand with a snarl. "I can do it myself," he hissed, and Sakura sighed.

There was no getting through to him in a mood like this. She hovered around him as he made his way to the fence, worried. The way Sasuke was limping-well. She knew better than anyone that Sasuke loathed showing pain, in the proud way that so many other shinobi had, and the fact that he was letting his leg slow him down... _I'll kill Naruto if he's hurt Sasuke,_ she thought for a second, fierce and protective. _I don't give a fuck if he was my teammate. Teammates don't do _this_._

Naruto was still talking to Chika, with that _look_ on his face. He broke off to watch Sasuke advance towards them, and for a second he looked half-worried. That expression quickly melted into a kind of smugness that made her long to send her fist crashing into his face. _'Just like old times,'_ she thought grimly, and made a sincere effort to not look homicidal.

Kakashi raised his head from his book and gave them an evaluating look. He tucked the book away in a pocket of his vest and announced, "Sasuke, you're excused from training. Sakura, escort him back to his apartment so he doesn't get eaten by something along the way."

Sasuke stiffened. "What?" he snapped, voice hoarse. "I'm fine! I've had worse, Kakashi, don't be stupid."

Sakura said nothing but wordlessly started walking towards Sasuke's apartment. She had known Kakashi long enough to be able to tell when he was serious, and when he had another motive in mind. "Let's go, Sasuke," she said quietly.

Sasuke growled harshly under his breath before turning on his heel and stalking after Sakura. They walked in silence, Sakura's pensive, Sasuke's angry. Eventually she said, "Did you notice something... off? About Naruto, I mean."

"Hn."

Sakura sighed and had to resist the urge to slam her head into the closest wall. Preferably a brick one - she'd probably end up breaking one made out of wood.

"He seemed... angrier," she finished lamely, for lack of a better word. _Why_ was talking to Sasuke so _difficult_ sometimes? Sasuke snorted.

"I think the phrase you're looking for is 'an asshole'," he muttered.

'_Yes! He speaks!'_ thought Sakura. She laughed. "Yes, that. I guess... the mission? I wonder what happened."

Sasuke arched a brow. "Clearly he simply got a reality check. We've all changed, Sakura. Don't freak out."

She stopped in the middle of the road and turned to face him, scowling. "Yes, we've changed," she began, "but not like this. Don't belittle this, Sasuke - you saw what he was like when you two were fighting!"

Sasuke's mouth turned into a hard line. "And don't blow things out of proportion. So he's gotten stronger; that just means I'm going to have to train harder to keep up."

And here, Sakura thought, was the crux of the matter. Sasuke could be so...so self-absorbed at times. Of course he would immediately focus on how Naruto had beaten him, rather than how he'd changed; in Sasuke's mind, anything less then perfection was unacceptable. After all, Naruto had always been Sasuke's rival.

"You're talking like you're assuming that he's still going to be part of this team," she muttered.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sasuke sounded unreasonably angry.

"Well, you can't expect that Kakashi's going to keep him on! Come on, Sasuke. He practically destroyed you." Sasuke's jaw clenched, and she ignored it. "We can't work with someone like that. Would you really trust him to watch your back on a mission? After _that_?"

Sasuke looked away from her. "You're giving up too easily," he muttered. She sighed, walking slowly to compensate for Sasuke's injuries.

"I know, it's only been a day. But I don't trust him, Sasuke. Can you honestly say he's the same as before?"

"It's been three years, Sakura."

"Exactly."

They had reached his apartment. Sasuke unlocked the door without saying anything more, but when Sakura made to follow him inside, he turned and leveled a blank look at her. "There's no need for you to come inside," he said, unemotional. "See you tomorrow."

"Sasuke - " she started, but he shut the door in her face. She stared at it, then sighed. Maybe Sasuke was right, and she wasn't giving Naruto a fair chance. Maybe she _was_ overreacting. But if she wasn't...

She'd already lost one teammate. She would _not_ lose another.

* * *

><p>Kakashi carefully watched Naruto out of the corner of his eye as they walked to Ichiraku's. Naruto sauntered along beside him, taking everything in with a small, nostalgic smile on his face. Kakashi knew the feeling, from years long past when he had been in Naruto's place, returning from endless missions to find Konoha unbearably familiar and somehow naive. People milled around them, going about their business without much more than a passing glance at them.<p>

"It seems so small," Naruto said quietly. Kakashi blinked slowly and hummed.

"It's why we do what we do," he said, keeping his voice at it's usual casual drawl. "Innocence is a precious thing. We protect it. And each other."

Naruto swallowed and nodded. Then he perked up. "I _thought_ this looked familiar!" he crowed, excitement in his voice. Kakashi remembered how often they'd all come here with what felt like a punch to the stomach. "We're going to Ichiraku's, right? Awesome! Hey, Kakashi- sensei, you're paying, right? 'Cause you know I haven't gotten my mission pay or anything back yet, so it's really not fair if you make me shell out the money, and I just got back so it can be like my welcome gift and..."

Kakashi let Naruto's chatter filter through his mind absently. When they had reached Ichiraku's and sat at the counter, the owner's daughter came out, looking frazzled, wiping her hands on her apron. Kakashi couldn't remember what her name was; something with an A. Aiko? Amaya?

"Ayame!" Naruto shouted cheerfully.

The stress on the woman's face evaporated immediately, leaving shock behind. "_Naruto?_" she said incredulously.

"Ayame, it's been so long! How are you and old Teuchi doing?"

"We're great! Naruto, it's so great you've come back! Hey, Father, it's our favorite customer!"

Kakashi gritted his teeth and bore it throughout the greetings, catching-up, reminiscing, and finally asking them what they'd like. When the father-daughter pair had finally left, Naruto turned to Kakashi with a sunny grin. "So, Kakashi-sensei, what'd you wanna talk about?" he chirped.

"What was that on the field with Sasuke?" Kakashi asked softly, done skirting the subject. There were some things for which he had no sense of humour, and the safety of his students was one of them. And despite whatever they might say, he counted Sasuke _and_ Naruto as his students, still. Naruto had to know that he couldn't pull shit like that on this team... and Kakashi wanted to know why he had done it in the first place.

Kakashi knew very well how soul-destroying ANBU missions could be. He wanted to make sure that whatever damage had been done to Naruto wasn't going to be permanent.

At Kakashi's question, all of the levity on Naruto's face left, leaving behind a stoic mask. It was unnerving, to see Naruto not expressing some sort of emotion. "I gotta admit, Kakashi," he said quietly, and Kakashi noted the dropped 'sensei', "I expected better of a team trained by you."

Kakashi arched a brow beneath his headband. "Sasuke and Sakura are exceptional ninja," he said, forcing his voice to be mild. "Sakura beat you, didn't she?"

Naruto half-shrugged. "Yeah, after I'd fought both you _and_ Sasuke. Who was, by the way, far less skilled than I expected. Is he still your favorite student, _sensei_?"

"I don't have favorites."

Naruto snorted. "Right. You keep telling yourself that and maybe one day you'll believe it."

"So is that it, Naruto?" Kakashi let a little disdain filter into his voice. "You're still holding onto childhood grudges? I had thought three years was enough to mature you, but I guess not."

"Three years wasn't enough time for you to turn your team into a passable threat. I expected better out of Sasuke, really. _And_ Sakura. There were too many holes in her defense and her attacks are still weak, even if she is trained as a medic-nin."

"Then why didn't you take advantage of those weaknesses?"

"I didn't want to humiliate everyone at once." Naruto's deadly smirk flashed.

"Ah, yes. Humiliation. Let's talk about that, shall we?" Kakashi's gaze went steely. "What's your problem with Sasuke?"

"He's _weak_!" Naruto burst, the first uncalculated emotion he'd displayed since he came back to the village. "Take away his Sharingan and he's useless! I mean, you always were a shitty teacher, but even you should've corrected it! It took _Sakura's_ interference to get him away!"

"You used to know Sasuke better than almost anyone else. A liability his former best friend can perceive is not the same as being weak."

"Close enough," Naruto retorted, "what do you think Itachi was? Just some passing stra-? " He fell abruptly silent as their ramen arrived.

Ayame set the bowls down in front of them, face curtained by a fall of dark hair. She straightened and said politely, "Anything else I can get you?" Her eyes were far to perceptive for Kakashi's liking, and he scowled at her behind his mask. Naruto's grin had popped back up without a hitch. "Nope!" he said, "thanks, Ayame-nee!"

The woman nodded, face bland, and glanced at Kakashi. He shook his head and started to eat. Ayame left, and Naruto kept eating with the steady pace that Kakashi remembered from when he was thirteen years old. He sighed silently at the memory.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Naruto's head turn slightly, trying to catch a glimpse of his face beneath the mask. Kakashi grinned, and his heart lightened. His student was in there somewhere. There was still hope.

* * *

><p>Sakura walked into her tiny apartment, dropping her keys on the table with a sigh. She was angry, unhappy, dirty, sweaty and not in the mood to do anything but take a shower and bury herself in a pile of medical scrolls for a day or four.<p>

She got through the first half of that goal. Standing under the hot jets of water from the showerhead, she let her fears about Naruto, her concerns about Sasuke, and her anger with her (shameless) sister be beaten out of her by the spray. She sighed, indulging herself for three more minutes, before wearily turning off the shower and exiting the bathroom in a towel, shivering with cold.

"Sakura?"

Sakura nearly screamed. Grabbing the kunai hidden along the doorframe, she whirled around and pointed it at her sister, who gazed at her in faint puzzlement.

"What," Sakura hissed, "are you _doing_ here?" Chika blinked and looked slightly offended. "What, I'm not allowed to visit my baby sister?"

"You already saw me once today," Sakura muttered, stowing the kunai back where it had come from and turning to walk into her room.

"I didn't know there was a limit to how many times a day I could see you," Chika teased gently, wandering into the kitchen. Sakura made no response to that, taking her time and dressing in the most comfortable clothes she had. When she finally came out, Chika was leaning against the counter, sipping a cup of tea and looking aggravatingly calm.

"So?" Sakura asked. "What are you doing here?" Chika lifted an eyebrow and took a long swallow of tea, draining the cup. Absently, she walked over to the sink and started washing the mug.

"I remember your teammate," she mused, eyes unfocused. "Naruto. Loud blond kid, nobody liked him?"

Sakura nodded.

"I must admit," she continued, "I didn't expect him to grow up quite like..._that._"

_Oh, no, _thought Sakura despairingly, _she's not going to say that he's hot. No. She is not going to date him, they are going to stay the hell away from each other, if there is any justice in this world - _

"There's something...crooked about him. Like a bone broken that hasn't healed right. Something mysterious. Most girls go crazy over that sort of thing," Chika murmured as her fingers traced whimsical patterns on the kitchen counter. "And after being gone for three years, who knows how much he's changed."

She left, leaving those last sentences hanging over Sakura's head like a death threat.

_Damnit!_

* * *

><p>Naruto stood amongst the wreckage of his former apartment and seethed. <em>Fucking half-trained civilian idiots coming in here and screwing everything up - <em>stalking into what had once passed as the living room, he yelped in dismay at the sight of his couch, which had been slashed a couple of times with a knife.

"No, no, _no_!" He surveyed the damage in horror. He'd saved up for _months_ to get that couch! And despite the fact that it may or may not have some suspicious ramen-scented stains in a couple patches, and one of the legs was broken off and supported by a thick dictionary (the only use he'd every found for that particular useless book, which the Sandaime had given him in the vain hope that it might improve his vocabulary), the thought of coming home and flopping down on that couch and sustained him through many miserable days of slogging through freezing mud during spring in Kusa no Kuni.

Sitting down and tipping his head back, he picked aimlessly at the stuffing coming out of one of the slashes in the cushion. Some particularly innovative soul had spray-painted a few obscenities and a dick of mediocre artistic execution onto the ceiling in yellow. He knew better than to think that the vandalism was personal; the idiots who'd done it probably hadn't even known who's apartment this was, only that the person who lived it in had been gone for a long time. That's what happened when you rented a cheap apartment in this neighborhood; it was surprising that a bunch of hobos - or worse - hadn't already taken up residence in his former home.

Well, shit.

He had to stay here for tonight, at least, until he finally got payment for his mission. And even then, it wasn't like he was going to be able to afford even a half-decent house; the mission was only A-Ranked, not S-Ranked, and given a timetable of a year at most. Of course, after the mission had turned into such a clusterfuck for everyone involved, he supposed that he would be well within his rights to demand danger pay or something - but even if it did get treated as an S-rank, it was highly unlikely that he could actually buy a house. Maybe rent an apartment for a few months (if he also gave up eating and electricity), but not much else. Stupid fucking civilian council complaining about mission expenses.

Chika had mentioned something earlier about a minority of civilian councilmen (or councilwomen, he supposed), arguing for higher pay. But the sway of the more powerful members of the council, suspicious and resentful of shinobi, had brought all but a few over to their side, complaining of shinobi putting an unnecessary strain on their budget. After all, they reasoned, it was peacetime, was it not? Maybe it was time to retire some of the shinobi; Konoha wwas prosperous and there had been few rumours of discontent outside the city walls. Naruto snorted. It was never truly peacetime, ever; there were always plots, always people seeking to turn over the status quo. Naruto had to resist the urge to run over to the Civilian Council Room and wring their stupid, idiotic necks. Besides, their argument was ridiculous; the shinobi brought extremely large amounts of money into the village by taking missions for clients. If anything, reduced wages, which would alienate people from becoming shinobi and discourage shinobi themselves from risking their lives in service of whatever wealthy miser was overly-paranoid and required a guard to escort their overly-inflated egos through the countryside, was harming Konoha.

Sick of thinking about the numerous ways coming back home wasn't living up to his dreams, Naruto got up and paced around the apartment several times, and noted with faint stirrings of disgust that the left corner smelled rather strongly of piss. The air, thick with heat, indefinable stenches and three years' worth of dust, seemed to press down on his skin tangibly. Suddenly feeling a pang of longing for the clear black sky underneath the trees, he turned silently, crossed the room and left the apartment with nothing more than the sound of the door clicking behind him.

He passed noiselessly through the city; he'd been out in the forests for so long he'd almost forgotten how to keep his sandals from sounding against concrete. He didn't know why being quiet was important, but some leftover instinct from years gone by impressed silence upon him. When he finally made it to the edge of the city, he stopped and stared sightlessly at the walls, pale and rising up out of the darkness, streetlights failing to illuminate the tops so they were lost in the formless dark of the trees. He glanced behind him at the sleeping city, then began to climb.

The wall was built to be naturally chakra resistant - it would prove little enough deterrent to any enemies, but it provided borders, was a place where defenses could be easily erected, and eased something in the minds of all - civilian or shinobi - who saw it. There was something comforting about the thick, tall presence of it, even to those who knew better. He climbed up using his fingers and toes, kicking off his sandals at the base. Balancing at the top, he scooted closer to where a tree grew right up next to the wall, and leaned against it's trunk comfortably, straddling the wall. After a little while, he fell into a half-drowse, eyes unfocusing as something deep inside him relaxed in contentment at the quiet sounds of wind through the branches. He stayed that way till dawn.

* * *

><p><em>AN:_ Sorry about the wait! Finals mostly swallowed us up for a month or so, and have only just spat us back out. A bit worse for wear, but now hopefully we'll have more time for writing!


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter IV: Masks-In-Training

* * *

><p>Naruto woke up exactly as the sun began to show through the tops of the trees out of instincts ingrained into him by years in enemy territory. His stomach was pulled tight with hunger, but he ignored the pangs with the ease of long practice and made his way to the bridge, perching on the edge of the railing. Sakura arrived shortly after him, rubbing shadowed eyes, smelling of blood and antiseptics.<p>

"Long night at the hospital?" he asked with a hint of a smile in his voice.

Sakura glanced at him and husked out a hoarse, "Yeah."

"Any idea what Kakashi-sensei has planned for us today?"

Sakura tensed up slightly, perhaps subconsciously, when Naruto jumped down from the railing. All the same she answered tartly, "What do you think? I'm not a damn Yamanaka. How the hell do I know?"

Naruto raised his eyebrows and said, "Sorry, sorry! I thought Kakashi might've told you or..." He trailed off.

"No. It's not like he ever tells us anything anyways."

Naruto wisely decided to shut up after that. He still hadn't completely forgotten the multiple times Sakura had clocked him for lesser affronts. They sat in silence: Sakura staring at the river broodingly, Naruto glancing around for a glimpse of Sasuke or Kakashi.

After some time Sasuke came walking up to them, limping slightly. He nodded slightly to Sakura and ignored Naruto, who was staring first at his evidently injured leg, then at his bruise-shadowed jaw. Sasuke didn't look anywhere near his usual pristine self.

Sasuke caught his gaze and gave him a withering look; Naruto turned his concentration to the water quickly, worrying at the inside of his lip. _Was I too...no,_ he decided. _He needs to realize that he's not up to snuff._ Sasuke and Sakura were both good fighters, but they weren't _excellent._ They needed to be able to outclass anyone who came at them.

"How fascinating. There must be something new in that water, since you're all staring at it like idiots."

Kakashi's drawl made Naruto jerk slightly; he hadn't felt or heard anything. He turned; Kakashi's one-eyes gaze lingered on him for a second, then moved on to Sasuke and Sakura. Naruto had the distinct feeling he was giving them a condescending look, despite three fourths of his face being covered.

"Come on," the man said without ceremony, and he set off quickly for the Hokage's Tower. The rest of his team followed somewhat more slowly - Sasuke still injured from his spar (and why hadn't he gotten that fixed, anyways? There was no reason to continue to leave his leg unhealed other than stubborn pride - something else that would have to be remedied), Sakura shadow-eyed and exhausted from her hospital shift, and Naruto still sore from sleeping in that damn tree like an idiot.

When they reached the tower, Kakashi led them to a place Naruto himself had never been able to enter (despite his earnest twelve-year-old attempts) - the subterranean levels. Walking the narrow hallways gave him an itchy, jumpy feeling - it felt like a prison down here, though he knew that realistically the prisoners were all kept at a large, imposing building somewhat to the edges of Konoha. But that was just the place where they shoved people when they didn't want to look at 'em anymore - the enemy shinobi and missing-nin they apprehended wouldn't be kept in such an insecure location.

But certainly they weren't kept directly underneath the Hokage's Tower, just a few floors away from the leader of the village. _That's just stupid,_ he thought decidedly, and pushed away the images of lightless cells and the sounds of distant shrieks echoing through cold air.

Kakashi finally turned sharply and led them to a room where a bored jounin sat inspecting her ragged nails. She glanced up and arched a brow at them; "You got an appointment?" her voice was heavily laced with an accent that only belonged to those who grew up in Konoha's slums.

"We're here to see Ibiki," Kakashi said, and Naruto glanced at him sharply for the stiff reluctance in his former sensei's tone.

"You got an _appointment_?" the jounin repeated, unimpressed. "'Cause I ain't botherin' him withou' one."

Kakashi barked out a tense laugh and said, "Fine; check for Team 7. Or Hatake."

Fingertips clicked keys, and the woman yawned pointedly, then jerked her thumb to the door to the left of them. "Through there."

Kakashi gave her a two-fingered salute which she returned with equal sarcasm and stalked through the door. Naruto was liking this situation less and less, and he wondered why Kakashi looked like he was being led into Iwagakure's prisons. Subtly, he glanced around to find any possible escape routes, but the only way back out was though where they had come. Gritting his teeth, he continued on.

Sasuke and Sakura continued on through a door when Kakahi stopped and motioned them through, and Naruto followed with a penetrating glance at Kakashi, who avoided his gaze. There were four chairs sitting in the otherwise empty room; "Have fun, kids," Kakashi said with false cheer, and left.

Sakura dropped into one of the chairs with evident relief, while Naruto and Sasuke remained standing. He darted a look at Sasuke; the Uchiha looked paranoid, and kept on glancing around.

"Quit jumping around," Sakura said after a moment of tense silence, her eyes closed and head tilted back to expose her throat. "Nothing's going to happen. You guys are so weird; we're in the middle of Konoha! What're they going to do?"

_Interrogate me_, Naruto thought. _See if my loyalty remains intact, see if I've been fucked up beyond all repair, see if I'm a liability._ Neither of them moved, or replied.

"Freaks," she muttered, and relaxed further into her chair.

Naruto glared at her, and wanted to tell her that he could break her neck in three movements with the way she was sitting and probably kill her in a multitude of other ways with his bare hands. And at least a dozen more if he had a weapon. He met Sasuke's gaze, and saw his thoughts reflected in the disapproving line of Sasuke's mouth. The other had moved into the corner, where he could see the whole of the room, arms crossed and legs braced.

After a few more minutes of waiting, Ibiki came stomping through the door, slamming it open and making everyone jump, except Sakura, who just opened one lazy green eye and straightened somewhat in her seat. He glared at the lot of them. His face was just as scarred as Naruto remembered, but it seemed less shocking now. Now mostly what he felt was respect that Ibiki had even survived such an injury; someone taking a knife to your face wasn't exactly something that happened during your average C-ranked mission. He was lucky he hadn't lost an eye like Kakashi had.

"So you're Hatake's brats, are you," he said flatly, eyeing each of them in turn. His face twisted up in some kind of smile when he saw Sakura, gazing up at him without interest. He pointed at Sasuke. "You," he ordered, "come with me."

Sasuke didn't budge. "Where am I going?" he hissed. Naruto snorted to himself; _Wow, pissy much?_

"None of your bullshit, boy," Ibiki said, voice lowering. "Not many people get this opportunity, so why don't you just cut the attitude and do what you're told?"

The man turned without waiting for an answer and left; Sasuke stared after him in a perplexed kind of way and then slunk after him, looking sullen. Naruto bit back an incredulous laugh. Hell, if Ibiki could keep Sasuke in line, Naruto liked him automatically.

Nevertheless, he felt a tingle of apprehension when the door swung shut behind them. Wasn't Ibiki head of Torture and Interrogation? Absolutely nothing about this situation was good, in his eyes: Kakashi was gone, Sakura was essentially useless, and Sasuke had just been led away by the head of one of the most twisted, utterly demented ANBU divisions there was.

In short, if anyone entered this room and decided that they didn't like him, he was fucked sideways.

_Brilliant,_ he thought. When he'd come back to Konoha he'd thought that dealing with shit like this was behind him. Apparently not so.

But then again, he knew what truly happened behind closed doors within this city. So why did he feel so betrayed?

* * *

><p>Bluntly, Ibiki asked, "Are you loyal to Konoha?"<br>Sasuke stared at him for a long second. _Okay,_ he thought, _this is odd,_ and said, "...Yes," flatly.  
>Ibiki arched a brow. "You sure about that?" he asked, leaning back, deceptively casual. "The whole damn town knows about your kamikaze quest to destroy your brother."<br>Sasuke tensed. "What does that have to do with anything?"  
>"Well, <em>boy,<em>" Ibiki said, rolling his eyes, "I have a particular interest in figuring out which is deeper: your loyalty to your home...or your masochistic desire for pointless revenge for family long dead."

"It's not pointless!" Sasuke snarled viciously, rising out of his chair as if to attack Ibiki. "You don't know what it's like to see your older brother kill your entire family!"

Ibiki looked at him like he was an idiot. "No," he said, voice heavy with sarcasm, "and I don't really care. I'm not interested in discussing your tragic life story; all I want to know is, do you care more about the dead ghosts of your family, or the people who inhabit this village? And which, may I ask, can you actually protect?"

Sasuke gritted his teeth. Fuck, he didn't really like this guy. He made an effort to turn the tables on the interrogation master. "I have never done anything worth questioning my loyalty over."

He should have known it was pointless.

"No," said Ibiki, "but then again... you've never exactly _proved_ it, have you? Your teammate Naruto went on a three-year long mission for his village; Sakura puts in nights at the hospital in addition to her duties as a kuniochi. And you? You sit and brood about the deaths of people whom, let's face it, you've long forgotten. Can you even remember your mother's face?"

Sasuke snarled. "Don't _talk_ about - " He stopped himself. _He's winding me up,_ he thought, _waiting to see what I'll let slip. But he won't get anything._

"What do you want to know?" he said.

"Will you leave the village if you find your brother." It wasn't a question; it was a statement to respond to. Sasuke stared sightlessly at the wall behind Ibiki's scarred head. Somehow, he found himself answering honestly.

"I hope not."

Ibiki didn't respond immediately, but evaluated him for several seconds. Sasuke avoided his gaze.

"Itachi is still on the top of Konoha's wanted list, you know," Ibiki pointed out, his voice a shade softer. "We haven't stopped looking. Your best chance of finding your brother is to stay here and wait until a party is sent out to capture - or kill - him. The best thing you can do in the meantime is strengthen yourself so you have a higher chance of being picked. You are, after all, the only true Uchiha Konoha has left. And," maybe it was just his imagination, but Ibiki's voice grew milder still, "the one person we have who knows him well."

Sasuke stared at the ceiling. "I don't know him at all," he said, and flinched at the bitterness in his own voice.

Ibiki nodded slowly. "You can leave now. Kakashi will be waiting outside the hallway for you."

* * *

><p>Naruto jerked out of his doze as the door Sasuke and Ibiki had left through, as the interrogater flung it open once more. He jerked a thumb behind him, looking straight at Naruto, and left without further action. Naruto scrambled out of his chair and followed the man to the hallway and through yet another door to a small, claustrophobic room, comprising of four walls, a table, and two chairs. He seated himself in one warily, and Ibiki dropped into another, flipping a knife idly through the nimble fingers of his left hand. He smiled sharply when Naruto looked at him.<p>

"Uzumaki Naruto." He pronounced every syllable with great care. "We haven't gotten a chance to chat yet, have we? About your... stay away?"

_He makes it sound like a vacation._ "Well," he said, drawing out the word, "I already submitted my mission report. What else is there?"

And a long fucking report it had been, too. Three years worth of terror and nightmare-material, to be written down and filed in one of Konoha's endless storage cabinets.

"Oh, but I'm not interested in the report. I'm interested in _you_. Tell me - how did you like your excursion beyond the village walls?"

Lying to this man was useless, he already knew. "It was hell," he said flatly. "And not just because we didn't have bathrooms."

_He had been running for weeks now, and the exhaustion in his bones was a familiar friend. In front of him, the other three members of his 'team' travelled on, tireless and silent. He was painfully aware that they were going slowly for him - when injured and unconscious last week one of them had carried him at twice the speed they were going now. But no one ever said anything to him about being slow, despite how Himitsu sometimes looked at him - like he was a ponderous, clumsy idiot. Which... was kind of true. But Himitsu was a prissy, girly bastard, so whatever._

_Genkaku fell back a bit to say, "We've almost reached it. A quarter of an hour more, and we can set up camp."_

_Naruto wanted to ask exactly _where_ they had 'almost reached', since this particular stretch of woods was just as dark and cold as the last stretch of woods, and the one before that, and he was pretty sure that nothing was going to change in the fifteen measly minutes they spent continuing on. The ground here would be just as muddy and miserable as the ground anywhere else._

_But he knew better than to whine - he would _never_ whine in front of Genkaku. He just gritted his teeth, nodded (which, when the wind from his passing blew in his face like that, made his neck snap forwards and back in a painful way), and continued on._

"_Alright," said Genkaku, after an indeterminable amount of time, "we stop here." And just like he had thought, there was absolutely nothing to mark out this place from one three miles back. He was used to following orders that made seemingly no sense by now, though; the ANBU could see more than he could._

_While setting up camp - sometimes it seemed like he had only been brought along on this miserable mission so he could do everyone's scut work for them: open the bedrolls, find wood, figure out how to get Himitsu's ink to the exact consistency and darkness - Naruto noticed Genkaku standing silently with his back to the rest of them, staring out into the darkness between the trees. He turned to see Naruto looking at him, and Naruto got the distinct impression that he was raising his eyebrows. "Has unrolling the pallets defeated you?" he asked, and Naruto ducked his head and continued on._

_Himitsu, with his space already set up (he refused to allow what he called 'that child's grubby paws' onto any of his stuff except his inkpots - Naruto had no idea how anyone so obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness had made it to become a shinobi, much less ANBU, since grime, guts and blood were kind of part of the job description), was quietly and carefully unscrewing bottles of ink and laying them in front of him in a precise line. When this was done, he removed a brush from somewhere around his person, placed that in front of him, and then carefully took a kunai and sliced the length of one thumb, then the other. Himitsu didn't have the usual teeth-shaped scars from biting into his thumb; he used knives instead, despite how impractical it was. Naruto rolled his eyes. Himitsu then lay out several scrolls in a row in front of him, then closed his eyes. Sitting cross-legged, with his hands turned down over his knees and a serene expression, Naruto thought that he looked like a particularly bitchy sage. When Himitsu cracked an eye open and arched a superior eyebrow in Naruto's direction, the effect was compounded._

_Whatever. He didn't need to know why Himitsu seemed to be preparing for a battle while he slept. He flopped down on his own bedroll and shut his eyes determinedly, waiting to fall asleep._

_But for some reason, sleep wouldn't come. He lay, tense and stiff on the ground, eyes squeezed shut and ears alert for any sound. He heard the scrape of kunai and sat up quickly; it was Tomoko, sharpening her weapons. Genkaku said her name sharply, and Tomoko muttered an apology. She flashed Naruto a smile when she saw him looking at her; Tomo was the one who went most often without a mask. Genkaku could never be seen without his, and Himitsu took his off only before bed. Tomo never wore it except in battle._

_She adopted a pose similar to Himitsu's, and faced outward, her back to their small fire, eyes calm. She had restowed her kunai; after a second Naruto realized, with a chill, that she had her mask cradled in her hands. He got up._

"_Tomo - are we - " he started, but she put her finger to her lips. Awkwardly, he settled down next to her. He could see nothing but the vague forms of trees, and darted a glance at her. She watched, impassive, for long silent minutes. Naruto felt his eyelids grow heavier, and tried to channel the same composure that Tomoko displayed so easily. _

"_Now," she hissed, and surged to her feet. Naruto, having fallen into a daze, scrambled up with considerably less grace; he let two kunai fall into his hands and, unsure of what to do, watched as Tomoko ran swiftly past the circle of their firelight into darkness. Silence, a crash, then the clang of steel and a hiss. Himitsu was beside him suddenly, tugging him back away from the sounds of battle with bloody hands. The cuts on Himitsu's thumbs had clotted; he scraped them open with his nails and streaked blood across the scroll he held. Activated by his blood, the complicated symbols inscribed on the scroll twisted and slithered off of the paper like living snakes. They stretched up and around him and Himitsu before fading out. _

"_What - " Naruto started. _

_Himitsu smacked his head and told him to shut the fuck up._

_Swallowing, Naruto couldn't quite muster up the energy to be offended._

"_They're coming," said Himitsu. "Don't do anything, don't move, don't leave the circle of the seals." Glancing down, Naruto saw that the seals were indeed imprinted on the ground, slightly glowing characters arranged in a circle._

_He looked up again, and Himitsu was gone. "What the - Himitsu!" '_The bastard left me here!_' he seethed._

_Before, Naruto would have left, but not now. He knew the consequences of disobeying orders. (Himitsu had disobeyed, once before, and Genkaku had said something nice and nonthreatening like "Let's go scout the area", and when they had returned Himitsu was pale and shaking and ashamed and Genkaku strolled along beside him, smiling though Naruto couldn't see it.)_

_Needless to say, Naruto didn't want to have one of those 'harmless talks' with Genkaku. So he did what he had been told, and stayed shut up, and remained within the boundaries of the circle. He heard a shout, a name - "Tekketsu!" (that was Tomo's ANBU name, Naruto vaguely remember- and he saw flashes of movement coming closer. He didn't move as the missing-nin appeared, like magic, from between the trees, and he didn't move when a sword appeared, like magic, in the middle of his chest. The missing-nin looked down, gaped, fell to his knees, and Naruto stayed where he was._

_After long moments, Himitsu and Tomoko came into his sight. He was supporting her, her arm around his neck and her leg dripping blood. She was limping, and when she reached her free hand up to rip off her mask, he saw her face fixed in a grimace. For the first time, when she saw him, she didn't smile._

_Later, when everyone had returned and the bodies had been disposed of and Himitsu's protective seals dismantled, he watched Himitsu carefully remove Tomoko's armour from her leg, piece by piece. She held a piece of wood in her hands, and her grip tightened on it till it splintered, as he finally got it off and eyed the injury. "Probably won't heal in one go," he said, and Tomoko cursed at him. "Will someone please tell me why we didn't bring a fucking medic on this mission?" she demanded. No one answered._

_Naruto watched Himitsu tend to Tomoko's leg and bandage it up, while Genkaku was off seeing if there were any more missing-nin in the area. Any fear he had felt about the fight was gone; nobody was going to die, there had been no lasting repercussions. The only thing he still felt was shame, deep and acid in the pit of his stomach. Shame and anger._

_Next time, he wouldn't be so useless._

Naruto pursed his lips as the... _unpleasant... _memory passed through his mind. "What do you want," he said, his tone so flat that it was hard to tell if it was meant to be a question or not.

"What do I want? Why, Naruto, I want lots of things. A raise. Some decent lackeys. A challenge... but you're giving me that right now. How was your mission?"

"I just told you."

"I was told you met some interesting people."

"Interesting?" Naruto snorted. "Yeah, they were real interesting. They seemed to have strange fixation on finding different ways to make me scream. I can't imagine why."

Ibiki smiled, in a way that said, _'I can.'_

"What did they want to know?"

"Read the damn report." Naruto was getting sick of this game. "Look, how about you just tell me what you want to know and let me get out of here?"

"Oh, but Naruto, it's not that simple. You see, what I need to know isn't a matter of yes or no answers. The human mind... it's a fascinating thing. A man can love his village and still want to destroy it; he can be relieved to come home, yet long to be away. We are full of contradictions, don't you think?"

Naruto tensed. "Is that what this is about? I've sacrificed three years of my life for this village - and you're asking me if I'm _loyal_? What the bloody _fuck_?"

Ibiki just tilted his head and gave him that creepy-as-fuck smile again. Naruto stared at him. "Whatever," he snarled after a second. "I don't have to listen to some sadistic freak quiz me on how much I love my home. And why, can I ask, is this coming now? I've just come back - I haven't done _one_ thing questionably since I returned."

Ibiki arched a brow. "Interesting, how you phrased that. Are you invested in keeping your actions... unquestionable?"

_Fuck,_ Naruto thought. Ibiki had dealt with hundreds of shinobi unwilling to talk before; he was sensitive to the smallest slip in composure or speech. He had to be more careful.

"You're just grasping at straws, now," he said. "Three years away, and I've only just come back. Tell me, does everyone who risks their lives for their village get interrogated like this? Seems like a pretty fucking thankless welcome if you ask me."

Ibiki laughed cruelly. "No one's trying to dispute your status as shinobi-who-went-on-the-most-traumatizing-mission, hero." He sat back in his seat and eyed Naruto for a second. He glared back.

"You were the annoying-as-fuck kid who wanted to be Hokage, right?"

Naruto smiled humourlessly. "That's me."

Ibiki nodded once. "Just between you and me, I knew a little about Hiroshi." He smirked at Naruto's incomprehension. "You knew him as Genkaku. He started out in T & I, did you know? Couldn't stick with it, though."

He leaned forward, amusement vanishing from his face, voice low and compelling. "You seem to want to take his place in a dangerous game, kid. And if you want to do that and risk getting yourself killed, that's your business. Just remember - Genkaku wasn't the only one who played that game. Try not to fuck _everyone_ over." Then he abruptly relaxed again, and smiled oddly at Naruto. "Send in the pink-haired girlie, would you?" he said, and started picked out dirt from under his nails with a kunai.

For the first time in a long while left completely flabbergasted, Naruto just sat there like an idiot for a couple minutes. Ibiki glanced up inquiringly; Naruto jumped, muttered something incoherent, and left the room with considerably more to think about than when he'd entered.

* * *

><p>Sakura was exhausted, cranky, confused, and not in any fucking mood to deal with anyone's shit, much less the head of T&amp;I's. She slumped down in her chair and proceeded to give Ibiki the moodiest look in her arsenal. He smiled at her genially, which, along with his scarred face, ended up as being more creepy than comforting.<p>

"I'm loyal," she snapped, before he could get anything out. "Also, not an idiot, unlike the rest of my team," she added. "Are we being recruited for ANBU?"

Ibiki didn't blink. "You are certainly smarter than those tragic, angst-ridden boys of yours," he mused. "How did you guess?"

Sakura rolled her eyes. "Kakashi's being jumpy, the fact that we're being taken to see _you_ when not one of us has done anything wrong, the fact that this has been hinted at for months by Tsunade-sama, the fact that fifteen other people this years have been recruited so far - a record, by the way... oh, and maybe that underneath the Hokage's Tower is where ANBU's _official _base is? Which is bullshit, by the way. Everybody knows. You're not fooling anyone."

"Right," said Ibiki, "You, I like. The rest of your team..."

"Dumbasses," said Sakura, "I know."

Ibiki chuckled, then stood. "Well," he said, "I guess I'll see you on Monday, as always."

"Remember not to dismember anyone while I'm away," Sakura muttered, and slouched grouchily out of the room.

Naruto hadn't bothered to wait for her, it seemed, so she left, heading straight for her apartment. Someone called out to her - Ino, or possibly Tenten - and she sped up, in no kind of mood to socialize. Stumbling into her apartment, she flopped down onto the bed, and fell asleep with gratifying swiftness.

* * *

><p>Sasuke sat at Ichiraku's, mechanically eating the first thing he'd seen on the menu. That scarred freak's words replayed in his mind - <em>"Can you even remember your mother's face?"<em> That asshole, he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. Nobody else's family had been slaughtered like so much cattle; no one else had gone through what he had, just because he'd had the misfortune to be born with a homicidal psycho for a brother. His chopsticks scraped the bottom of the bowl; he looked down, refocusing his gaze, and picked up the bowl, draining it absently. That done, he set it back down, tossed some money on the counter - he didn't know how much and didn't care, he'd just pay extra next time if it wasn't enough - and wandered back to his apartment, with nothing else to do. Sakura was sleeping and he didn't feel like finding some random idiot to spar with (there was always someone around if you wanted to work off a little steam, and sometimes, once in a blue moon, if Sasuke was _really_ lucky, they weren't a complete waste of his time), so instead he sat down and attempted to study some scroll or another.

He couldn't focus. "_Fucking_ Morino," he said savagely, and, flopping down on his side, shut his eyes.

When he woke it was around three hours later, and he felt like some slug-shaped life-form had crawled around in his mouth, curled up, and putrefied. He brushed his teeth twice, washed his face, and decided to never take an impulsive nap ever again in his life. He glanced outside; it was early evening, now, and he was hungry. The idea of eating in the apartment was unappealing, so he grabbed his keys and left the apartment, walking aimlessly around, looking for, and finally finding, a place that wasn't in danger of being shut down for health reasons.

Of course, he couldn't make it through one fucking meal without some idiot deciding to bother him. The two-fingered tap on his shoulder made him grit his teeth. He turned his head slowly, suddenly aware of the hush that had fallen over the restaurant. Everyone was staring at him, faces transfixed in horror and fascination.

When he finally saw the asshole who'd interrupted him, he wasn't surprised to see a white mask, faceless and painted with a red swirl. The ANBU stepped back, handed him a thin, official-looking scroll, then turned and vanished without a sound. Sasuke stared at the place where he had disappeared, slightly numb.

He didn't know what you had to do to get yourself a special visit by an ANBU member in full regalia. But he was sure it wasn't good.

His appetite swallowed up in the growing nausea in the pit of his stomach, Sasuke pushed the remnants of his food away and left without ceremony (or _vanishing_ in the middle of the fucking room without a trace of chakra; every single one of those ANBU were complete and utter attention whores despite the fact that they were supposed to be the most secretive of all shinobi). He couldn't remember if he'd already paid or if he still had to; either way it wasn't important. He could come back and give them however much he owed if it turned out that one insignificant bento was that important to them.

He wanted to both run out of the village, clear the walls in one jump, and then maybe go and see if some random missing-nin wanted to train him or something so he'd never have to return to Konoha, or somehow tunnel his way underground and pop out in the middle of the ANBU headquarters demanding to see the boss in a suitably intimidating manner. Instead he took a leaf out of Kakashi's book and strolled leisurely through the village as if thoroughly enjoying the sights. This got him a few double-takes from people who recognized him, but he ignored them with the ease of long practice. Stares were nothing new to him.

When he reached the destination given on the scroll, he frowned slightly. He had expected the ANBU headquarters to be somewhat different - somewhere in the back of his mind had lain a childish image of a tall, dark building with few windows and a masked man watching the door, demanding passwords when you entered, but he knew that was stupid. No, he had thought, realistically, it would be something nondescript - a place that posed as a normal residential house, or a library, anything normal that people's gazes would automatically pass over. It didn't much appeal to his eight-year-old self's sense of adventure, but it was more practical.

What he got was a bit of a mix between the two. Throughout Konoha's financial and business districts, there were structures exactly like this one - hulking, beige things with crude pretensions to grandeur, that mostly manifested in too-cold offices and really terrible art hung up on the walls. The parts of his mind that still retained a bit of the high-class contempt for such plebian, self-important buildings recoiled from entering. He rolled his eyes at himself and climbed up the few thick steps, eyeing the two blobs of ill-formed stone that appeared to be trying to be statues on either side of the door, then grabbed the heavy door-handle and stepped inside.

Naruto was sitting in a tree when his new teammates showed up. He had been wondering, in an idle sort of way, why it seemed like all he had done since returning to Konoha had involved, in some way or another, being stuck in a tree (metaphorical or not), when he heard the muted swoosh of someone arriving directly below him.

Silently, he leaned forwards and peered through the leaves and branches of his tree, to see the head below him. It was black, and had some mildly ridiculous spikes at the back. He settled back very carefully, and hoped to any and every deity he had ever heard of that there was someone in Konoha who sported the exact same hairstyle as Sasuke.

Maybe it was because of how many times he had cursed any and all gods in the past, but when a couple of minutes had passed, Sasuke tilted his head to the side and glanced around him, tensing. Naruto had just been contemplating whether to throw something at his head to get him to notice him, and had just scrunched up his face in irritation at the lost chance when Sasuke turned around and stared directly up at him, in a distinctly glarey fashion.

"What," he started, and then looked away with a frown. "Please tell me _you_ are not one of my teammates," he hissed. Naruto smiled lazily and shrugged, swinging his leg over the branch. "Sorry," he said brightly, and jumped down to join Sasuke on the ground.

His former - well, now current - teammate gave him a look made of equal parts disgust and fury, and pointedly looked away. "Took you long enough to spot me," Naruto remarked, and he could practically hear the other's teeth grinding. "Why, Sasuke, you're being so anti-social! I'm your old teammate, newly returned from hell - don't you want to make nice and trade stories?"

"Just... shut up," he muttered, leaning his head back against the trunk of the tree. Naruto looked at him for a second, Sasuke's eyes closed and his expression tight, then forced a smirk and glanced off to the left, where he could hear someone approaching. "Well," he continued, "here's to hoping our other teammate isn't - "

"Oh, you have _got_ to be kidding. Really? They put me with _you_ two again?"

"I'm hurt, Sakura-chan. Truly. Don't you love us? Well, since loving Sasuke is impossible impossible - don't you love _me_?"

"You're a pain in my ass, the both of you," she grumbled, and crossed her arms. "Are we really that much of a dream team, that they're throwing us together again? Isn't putting old teammates together against the ANBU code or something?"

"It's unusual," Naruto said slowly. "You're not supposed to get too attached to your teammates, and having old friend on the same team... it isn't really conducive to professionalism." Then he brightened. "Well, none of us like each other anyways, so that's fine!"  
>Sakura snorted and gave him a dry smile. "Such big words, Naruto-kun," she cooed. "'Conducive' and 'professionalism'. Who taught you <em>those<em>?"

"What can I say, Sakura-chan? I'm just a smart guy." Naruto gave her his widest smile, and she swallowed a laugh. Pleased, Naruto straightened when he felt someone approaching.

A short woman with purple hair and wearing a large quantity of mesh stepped out of the trees and grinned at all of them in a way that showed a disturbing amount of teeth. Naruto felt a little shudder twist his way up his spine and tried to remember where he'd seen her before.

"Hey, kids!" she chirped.

Sasuke made a slightly horrified, choking sort of noise. Naruto looked at him in brief concern, then realized where he'd seen the woman before.

"You at the chuunin exams! Anko, right? You were the proctor!"

"Hm?" She gave him a vague look. "Oh... those. You were the obnoxious blonde kid. I remember you." She looked him over and smirked. "I see nothing's changed."

Naruto withdrew into a sullen silence. Sasuke looked at her approvingly.

Anko clapped her hands together in a gesture that should've seemed childish, but made the three jump all the same. She ignored their starts, though the smirk took on a more smug quality. "Alright, team," she said conversationally, "it's clear to me at first glance that not only are you unfit for service in ANBU, but whatever meagre talent you possess is trapped under the crushing weight of your stupidity. Therefore, it's my job to help you poor, unfortunate souls."

She turned on her heel and stalked off into the forest, beckoning them after her. "Come on, idiots!" she called back brightly, and slowly, uncertainly, they trailed behind her.


	5. Chapter 5

**Illusions**

* * *

><p><em>Chapter V: <em>It's Not Enough - It Never Is

* * *

><p>The moment Sakura stepped into her apartment, she felt her last vestiges of strength drain away. Stumbling against the door, she closed her eyes for a long moment, taking the time to dreamily fantasize about inflicting every ache, cut, and bruise she felt on Anko Mitarashi.<p>

Funnily enough, Sakura had been under the impression that once she joined ANBU, she might actually be assigned missions. Interesting missions. Dangerous missions. Missions that weren't a waste of her time.

But, no. Evidently that was not to be the case, for the only thing they had done under Anko's careful tutelage was train until their trembling fingers couldn't form seals or fists anymore. Then, exhausted and leaning against whatever was closest (trees, fences, each other) they would listen in complete silence to Anko's acerbic, piece-by-piece breakdown of precisely how and why they were incompetent, genin-level excuses for shinobi. Interrupting only achieved a poisonous tirade directed solely on you, instead of the generally humiliating tongue-lashing.

She appeared to get a particular kick out of getting personal with each one of them. With Sakura, she discussed how 'pathetically weak' the girl had been before getting her act together, and Anko's 'professional doubts' about whether she would make it to either Sasuke or Naruto's level; Sasuke had to listen to the vague, concealed allusions to his family and, more particularly, Itachi, in teeth-grinding silence; with Naruto she discussed the prevalent hero-complex and more than slightly unrealistic dreams. They took the rapid-fire dressing-downs without comment, and seethed silently, swearing to prove her wrong.

Sakura forced herself to choke down something adequately packed with carbohydrates and proteins, downed two liters of water, and then stumbled off to bed. She slept, deeply and without so much of a hint of a dream, and woke up only when her alarm shrilled at her hysterically in the middle of the night. Sakura's hand shot out and slammed down, pressing all of the buttons on the top at once, and the alarm clock fell into a chagrined silence. She had cracked the black plastic encasing. One day she was going to break that thing completely.

Rolling out of bed, Sakura stared at the shadowed ceiling, sleep thick in her mouth and frosting her eyes. Finally, with a great effort of will, she picked herself up and dragged herself into the shower, not bothering to wash her hair despite how greasy it felt, and then set off for the hospital.

When she arrived, she changed into her medic-nin scrubs and coat, tucking her pager into her pocket and stethoscope around her neck. It was three in the morning, and Sakura's shift ended in twenty-four hours, after which she could catch maybe five hours of sleep before going to meet the rest of her team. She tried to push aside the welling up of exhaustion that engulfed her at the thought, and started when her pager beeped. Glancing down, she saw it was Tsunade; sighing, she made her way to where the Hogake worked when she was at the hospital (which was not very often, seeing as being the Hokage usually took precedence over anything else. Tsunade insisted on allotting some time to Konoha General, though, claiming that it kept her sane when sake was gone and paperwork was piling up).

Tsunade's office was neat, uncharacteristic for her. Sakura privately thought that the reason the Godaime was so disorganized and willing to leave things to 'destiny' ordinarily was due to her near-obsessive precision when it came to her medical work. Human lives were the one thing she refused to take chances on.

Tsunade motioned with a long hand for Sakura to take a seat, head still bowed over a chart. Finally, she sighed and set the chart aside, folding her hands under her chin and looking at her levelly. Sakura noticed, with a jolt of discomfort, the deep shadows under Tsunade's eyes, the faint lines on her face. The Hokage didn't look like her usual, beautiful self.

"Your training with Anko is done, apparently. You will be getting a mission as a team tomorrow after your graduation ceremony or whatever the hell happens in ANBU. I won't say much now since you'll get the mission briefing tomorrow - it's the equivalent of a D-Rank ANBU mission, so don't get too excited. Go get some sleep anyway, you look like you could use it."

Sakura blinked, "All right, shishou," and stood up. "You might want to get some rest too."

Tsunade rolled her eyes. "Brat," she muttered affectionately.

Sakura grinned and practically skipped out of the hospital. Sleep! She was practically giddy with the thought. Sakura sobered up pretty quickly when she realized that she was going to be permanently stuck with two absolutely insane, fucked up teammates for however long this mission took. Alone, in a forest, with Sasuke and Naruto.

_Why me?_ she thought, scowling.

* * *

><p>Anko munched cheerfully on a stick of dango as she faced down the three uncomfortable jouninANBU whatever they were classified as now. They were still childish brats as far as she was concerned. Too bad she would have to refer to them by their codenames now. Stupid ANBU regulations were practically created to end her fun. Anko stuck out her lower lip a bit and pouted. Duck-butt jumped, Pinkie rolled her eyes, and Fox-Face's expression was so blank it was almost disturbing.

The kid was definitely touched in the head. Ibiki was right 'bout something for once. Anko swallowed her last bite of dango slowly, savoring it, before she finally spoke to the new ANBU. Not that any of them knew of their new position yet.

"So unfortunately it seems that someone up there has deemed your useless asses ready to graduate. Which means I was charged with the task of figuring out your new code names and masks. Too bad they're looked over by superior officers or they could have actually been fun."

Anko pointed lazily with one heavily-bitten nail to Sasuke. "You can be... Chuugi." Sasuke's face contorted oddly, something between twisted pride and disbelief.

"Chuugi?" he repeated, imbuing the word with incredulity. Anko smiled at him, knife-sharp, and said, "You're pretty loyal, kid. To all the wrong people, of course..." and before Sasuke could do anything more than stiffen and open his mouth to respond, she gestured to Naruto. "Ukime."

Narto barked a short laugh. Sakura stifled a giggle and, forgetting who she was talking to, said, "Have you ever met Naruto?"

The amusement in Anko's expression drained away. She looked at Sakura expressionlessly. "Know your teammates, girl. You think three years on mission don't change a person? You think I don't know Naruto? I know more about him just from reading the first three pages of his mission report then you do. And you spent what, a year as his teammate? Not that you ever bothered to get to know him then either." Anko smirked cruelly. "Yotogi."

Sakura's gaze had fallen to the ground, her jaw clenched tight. Naruto had his eyes shut like he was praying for Anko to be suddenly struck down by a stray bolt of lightning before she got Sakura to start questioning him. _Whatever, kid_, she thought distainfully. _You're not as smart as you think, and trusting people won't always get you knifed in the back._

* * *

><p>Sasuke was, predictably, the first one to arrive at the meeting spot before they left on their mission. Dropping his light pack on the ground next to him, he leaned back against a tree, closed his eyes, and crossed his arms, fighting the urge to scratch at his face. The cold porcelain touching his skin wasn't necessarily uncomfortable, but it left him feeling curiously trapped. He hadn't realized how much he had relied on his sense of smell and peripheral vision before it was denied to him.<p>

But fiddling with the mask was unprofessional and childish. So he stilled his restless fingers and ignored the sheen of sweat he could feel next to his cheekbones, mouth tightening in discomfort.

Naruto's arrival was unexpected; Sasuke was used to hearing him a mile and a half away. He tried not to jump as he felt the unfamiliar presence, and opened his eyes only lazily. Naruto had shoved his mask to the side of his head and had cut off the sleeves of his standard-issue ANBU blacks. Sasuke sighed sharply, then paused as he saw the seals running up and around his upper arms.

_Are those...?_

"Evenin'!" Naruto said, annoyingly chirpy.

Sasuke bit his tongue on a nastier remark and only said, "It's afternoon." It would do no good to antagonize Naruto so early into their mission... despite how dearly Sasuke wanted to.

Naruto pouted exaggeratedly. "Well, aren't we grumpy tonight."

"Today," Sasuke bit out, and kicked himself mentally. _He's doing this on purpose._

Naruto just smiled, sunny and wide, and started kicking the bright leaves that had just begun to fall, whistling quietly to himself. Sasuke tried to shut his ears to the aggravatingly catchy tune and closed his eyes again. _No fireballs. Do not roast him on the spot. You are ANBU now. This is where you've wanted to be for years. First mission - don't fuck it up._

If Sakura didn't show up soon he was going to kill something.

Fortunately it was only a few moments later that she arrived, not quite as soundless as Naruto had been. He frowned at the memory of that silence, and then put it aside. If Naruto was quiet, it was a good thing. He wouldn't get them all killed.

_But you can't move like that,_ the childish part of him thought.

"Hi - " Sakura started to say, but Sasuke cut her off.

"Let's go," he said curtly, the patch of discomfort that had become his face, the incessant whistling of his moronic teammate, and the sudden sense of claustrophobia that set in as soon as he thought about staying another minute in the village all compounding into one impatient itch to leave. He took off, without bothering to look at his teammates.

"You're going east!" Sakura called. "Isn't Suiban to the north?"

Sasuke ignored her determinedly, but behind he could hear Naruto laughing.

"Uchiha Sasuke, get your ass back here before I make you!"

Practically snarling with anger, Sasuke veered sharply to the north and continued on. Sakura yelled something riddled with obscenities behind him, and she was next to him soon, giving him vicious looks in between the trees.

"Why - " she hissed out between breaths, "do you let him bother you so much?"

Sasuke side-longed a glare at her, realized she couldn't see him through the mask, and finally noticed that she had hers pushed to the side of her head as well. Covered by pink bangs, he couldn't see the animal. Naruto's had been something vaguely rodent-like, he recalled with satisfaction.

"Piss off," he told her, and knew it was a mistake. Sakura's poison-green eyes narrowed.

"Excuse me? You're telling me to piss off? You're such a fucking - you're the one who just fucked off in the wrong direction, and then you have the nerve to bitch at me?"

_Ah, shit_, Sasuke thought despairingly. _She's going to rant at me._

"Well fuck you very much, too, you childish, insensitive prick! You can't even deal with Naruto - who is clearly just screwing with you - for more than five minutes before running off and pitching a fit? This mission is going to be absolute hell!"

Sasuke agreed profoundly, and resigned himself to misery as she continued.

* * *

><p>They passed the next hours in near complete silence. Naruto had desperately fought off laughter for the first half hour, remembering the furious words that Sakura had hurled at Sasuke, and the other's sullen, wordless response. He couldn't believe he had dreaded this. He had the best teammates ever. Well, more like the best teammates to fuck with, but it was pretty much the same thing right?<p>

But after the bubbling hilarity had faded, he had begun to notice that the shapes of the trees that passed him were familiar, and the smell of green earth made his mouth fill with the phantom taste of blood. Staring at the two tense, black-clad backs before him, he tried not to imagine three people leaping ever-forward instead of just Sasuke and Sakura, tried not to reach for his kunai whenever someone made a misstep or shadows flickered in his hindsight. He pushed the mask further away from his face irritatedly. It bounced against the base of his skull every time he moved, and he could only imagine how it was for Sasuke, for whom it would be slamming into his nose and forehead whenever he jumped from branch to branch. _Sucks for him_, Naruto thought, but this time it was without humour. He remembered what it was like to wear that mask, even briefly.

_He was running, and there was stone instead of familiar earth beneath his feet. The rocky coast had yielded more missing-nin than they had thought, and he didn't know where Genkaku or Tomo were. Hell, at this point he'd settle for Himitsu, even with all his bitchy sage-ness._

Fuck, fuck, fuck,_ he chanted inwardly. The cave-riddled coast was, of course, not composed of some practical stone like granite, but instead shale that broke apart easily under his pounding feet. He could feel sharp rocks cut through his sandals that suddenly felt very flimsy. He kicked the ground viciously, and felt a bit of satisfaction as the piece of rock dislodged by his foot caught the man behind him. The missing-nin grunted, and Naruto felt something snatch at his shirt._

Fuck fuckfuck_, he thought, again, and felt his knees protest as he swerved sharply. Someone skidded behind him, and he would have smirked if he'd had the presence of mind. There was a dark opening to his right; he scrambled straight into it, and stilled. Hardly daring to breathe, he eased away from the mouth of the low cave and back into its depths. The ceiling got higher the deeper he went in; he straightened cautiously, still facing the opening to the cave. He could feel his breath against his own face from that damnable mask, which he guessed was something he should be grateful for since it was the only thing that had kept him anonymous to the missing-nin._

_A hand wrapped around his mouth from behind and he jerked his elbow back to crush his attacker's nose. The person evaded his arm easily and hissed, "Don't move, you idiot. They'll hear. Do you know nothing?"_

_Himitsu. Naruto twitched irritatedly and the other let him go, stepping back delicately and shuddering slightly. He thought he heard something like 'disgusting' come from Himitsu, but he ignored it. Bastard._

_"Do you really not know to never back into a cave?"_

_Naruto wished he could tell the ANBU to shut the fuck up, but he didn't trust his voice._

_Rock scraped just outside the cave, and he stopped breathing. Himitsu, frozen in the act of bending down, remained very still. Heavy breathing from outside made Naruto wrinkle his nose, and Himitsu pulled a slight face. A low curse from outside, then footsteps moved away._

_They didn't move for long minutes, then Himitsu sighed sharply and lowered himself into a graceful crouch. "We're not going anywhere," he told Naruto, who had made a movement to leave the cave._

_"What?" Naruto snapped, not in any sort of mood to deal with Himitsu's orders._

_"They're still out there, dumbass!" Naruto, struck by Himitsu swearing, remained silent. He stood still for a moment, then carefully folded himself up and leaned, knees drawn to his chest and arms around them, against the cold stone wall. Himitsu regarded him impassively for a moment, then snorted and looked away._

_Well, fuck Himitsu and his fucking... prissiness. There really was no other word to describe him. A prissy fucking bitchy sage who liked to give other, normal people derogatory glances just because they weren't jounin by age fifteen. The only damn experience he'd had before this with running away from people was when he was trying his best to stay the hell out of the way of a bar fight in his old neighborhood back in Konoha. How the fuckin' hell was he supposed to be on the level of a damn veteran ANBU after a damn year and a half as a Genin? Shit, he hadn't even passed the one Chuunin exam he had entered. And he'd only been with this team for one damn month, it's not like he'd had even close to enough time to adjust!_

_So screw Himitsu. If he wanted a better teammate, he shoulda fuckin' said so before they had all landed in this damn clusterfuck._

_"You're green," Himitsu said, unexpectedly. Then again, when had he ever made sense? The asshole was always unreasonable._

_Naruto blinked at him, belligerent. "What?" He glanced at his arm, self-conscious. "The fuck are you talking about?"_

_"Green. Rookie. Newbie. Dead weight. Baggage. Do you need me to elaborate?"_

_Naruto gritted his teeth. "Better than being a girly prancing little - "_

_"They teach you nothing. Genkaku and... Tomoko, as you call her. He is better, I guess. At least he tries." A snort. "They're content to let you tag along, doing nothing but being some mindless chakra battery whenever someone needs a refill, making a racket wherever - "_

_"Is there a fucking point to this?"_

_Himitsu's mouth thinned, and he sat up straighter. "It's a disgrace to ANBU. It has to change."_

_"Well, fuck you - " Naruto paused in the middle of what was going to be a very detailed explanation of just how Himitsu could fuck himself. After all, he was a child of the red district. "Are you... saying that... you'll train me?"_

_Himitsu looked reluctant to admit to anything. "I might... show you a few things. Of course, it's not like I'll be showing you seals or - "_

_"You'll train me?" Naruto felt a grin spreading across his face._

_"I - " Himitsu looked flustered, for once. "Don't get ahead of yourself."_

_Naruto laughed, suddenly not caring about the missing-nin who could very well be standing a few feet away from their cave. "I knew you liked me!"_

"Naruto!"

Jerked out of painful reminiscence, Naruto skidded to a halt and tried not to fall off of the tree branch. "What?" he snapped, wincing inwardly at his tone.

Sakura looked at him like he was an idiot. "It's been six straight hours. We need to take a break and set up camp."

Right. Naruto had forgotten that they weren't exactly as used to these long journeys as he was. He relaxed his muscles and let his shoulders droop, pasting a tired grin on his face. "I was wondering when we'd get to stop!"

Sakura raised a derisive eyebrow and leapt down gracefully to the ground. Naruto followed, making sure to stumble a bit as he landed. Sasuke had already begun to set up camp, and they followed his lead in silence. After crawling into his sleeping pallet, Naruto stared up at the impenetrable blackness of the trees above him; the thick branches shut out the stars. The deep ache in his bones was familiar, as was the numbness of his legs. He lay awake, trying not to think about the last time he'd felt this particular brand of exhaustion, and finally fell asleep hours later.

When he woke up, it was to Sakura rummaging around in her pack quietly. She noticed him moving and whispered an apology; he waved it aside and sat up, the soreness in his lower back protesting. It was just past dawn, and the pale light turned her pink hair lighter, highlighted the shadows under her eyes. He inspected her for a moment as she continued to dig around for whatever she was looking for.

Finally brandishing a silvery packet, she tossed it to him and brought out a small metal pot-like thing. Catching the packet, he saw it was oatmeal, and wrinkled his nose. "Unless you have cinnamon, I'm not eating this crap," he informed her.

Sakura gave him a look in between trying to build up the small, discreet fire. She dropped a match, swore, and hissed, "Are you kidding me? How old are you?"

"Five," Naruto responded flatly, throwing the packet back at her. She caught it with her teeth in a smooth move Naruto admired for a second, her hands still fumbling with matches. Finally relighting the fire and waiting to make sure it wouldn't start smoking, she poured water from her canteen into the pot-thing, shoved it amidst the low flames, and emptied the oatmeal packet into it. Naruto watched her do this, then snorted and concentrated for a moment to activate one of the seals on his arms.

"Hah! Took me forever to learn how to do that."

Sakura glanced up at his happy shout, and blinked in consternation. "Is that a red bean bun? Where did you get that?"

Naruto smirked at her, feeling inordinately smug. "I won't have to have any of your nasty oatmeal now."

"Where did that come from?"

Naruto blinked. "You - you didn't notice my seals?" He held out his arm for inspection. Sakura stared. He smiled. "Nice, aren't they?"

"What the fuck?" was her eloquent response. Naruto's smile faded.

"I thought they were pretty good," he said defensively, withdrawing his arm and eyeing the seals anxiously. "I kind of screwed up the storage stasis on the kunai one but it works pretty well anyways - I mean, sometimes there's this weird rust on some of them but I think that's just 'cause they're shitty quality - "

"You have storage seals on your arms? They're real?"

"Uh...yeah?" Naruto was confused. They were useful, and it's not like they were super painful to get or anything. Weren't they pretty common? Himitsu had always treated them like everyone had them, or at least the scroll version of them, and he hadn't understood why Naruto hadn't learned about them yet.

Sakura's look of shock faded into something more dangerous: contemplation. "You really don't think it's a big deal, do you? What did they show you on that mission?"

Naruto's teeth clicked together audibly. "They're just storage seals, Sakura," he said thinly. "They're nothing special."

"But they are," Sakura objected softly.

"No," said Naruto, curt. "You didn't expect me to come back as the same stupid kid, did you? Actually, don't answer that."

...He really needed to learn how to shut his mouth. Sakura's gaze had sharpened. "You're not the same stupid kid at all, are you? What changed on that mission, Naruto? What did you do?"

"Will you people _shut the fuck up_?"

Naruto had never had cause to thank the universe for blessing him with Sasuke, but at that point the Uchiha was his favorite person in the world. _Living person_, he amended.

"We've got oatmeal!" Naruto chirped, before Sakura could say anything. "Well. Oatmeal for you. I have red bean buns."

Sakura, thankfully, stayed silent.

"Piss off, Uzumaki," Sasuke grumbled, and turned over on his side.

Sakura picked up a rock and threw it at his sleeping back. "Get up, lazy-ass!"

Naruto's grin widened maliciously. "Sakura, you shouldn't waken princesses from their naps. They need their beauty sleep, y'know? Or else they turn into grouchy little assholes. I guess they need at least eight hours of sleep to keep up appearances or somethin'."

Sakura choked back a laugh, and Sasuke's back stiffened. Whistling the most obnoxious tune he knew (and he had quite a wide repertoire), Naruto busied himself with packing up, eating the buns while getting ready. When he was done, he leaned against a tree and watched Sakura practically inhale the oatmeal, then rush around to get ready. Sasuke ate with an expression of supreme distaste on his face, then shoved the mask on his face.

"Ready?" said Naruto mildly, and took off without waiting for an answer.

The muttered insults and curses behind him were music to his ears as he slipped the weasel-shaped mask over his face. He outpaced them for the first few minutes, then remembered to slow down. He heard Sakura demand how much further they had to travel, and Sasuke answered, "Half a day more."

Half a day.

_They had been sitting in that damned cave for hours, now. Under any other circumstance Naruto would consider being stuck in a cave with Himitsu for any length of time to be a horrific prospect, but not now. The prissy sage was now teaching him the very basics of seals in a hushed voice and his typical bitchy manner. But now, he knew that Himitsu's assholish tendances_ (_almost like Sasuke'_s, he thought, before he crushed that wisp of emotion)_ - were a semi-twisted form of tough love. Because in ANBU, being soft got you and everyone around you killed._

_And damnit, Naruto did not want to be a fucking burden for Genkaku and Tomo and even Himitsu cause they had treated him with more love and respect than anyone in Konoha ever had. Or ever will, a voice in his head whispered resignedly._

_"Pay attention, idiot!" A hand slapped the back of his head, and Naruto rubbed it, gazing irately at Himitsu. Well, Genkaku and Tomo treated him with respect. Himitsu was just an asshole, all the time. Even if it was supposed to make him stronger,_

_"Repeat what I just said," ordered Himitsu. Naruto furrowed his brow._

_"Uh, normally basic storage seals for like, shuriken, are two-pointed. And ones for chakra or containing chakra are three-pointed? So you have to make a special bridging seal-thingie if you hafta connect the two for something. Right? And like, it's the same for all seals since you can't overlap odd- and even-pointed seals without shit hitting the fan."_

_Himitsu arched a brow, then nodded very slightly. "Rough, but... generally correct, I suppose."_

_From Himitsu, that was practically a hug of congratulations._

_Naruto opened his mouth to continue, then Himitsu straightened and looked towards the mouth of the cave. Naruto fell silent, straining his ears. He could hear nothing, but Himitsu removed a kunai from somewhere on his person and slit his thumb open. Naruto felt his stomach plummet. Slowly, Himitsu rolled up his sleeve._

_Seals, black as fresh ink, decorated his too-pale skin, up and down his arms. Naruto stared, faintly recognizing the shapes of the few seals he knew, and others he could only guess at the uses for. One of the storage seals contained a scroll, evidently; Himitsu activated the seal and unrolled the scroll carefully, his bleeding hand hovering over it._

_Black ink mixed with blood trickled like molasses off of the scroll and fell with the faint plitter-plat of raindrops. The dark mixture surged across the cave walls like some sort of colony of creepy-ass centipedes. It wasn't long before Naruto lost track of all the whimsical shapes of kanji crawling across the walls. But he was aware of when the seal had finished embedding itself into the rock because it glowed faintly, once, before fading again. That done, Himitsu lifted a bloody finger to his forehead. Naruto jerked away reflexively._

_"Stay still, this will improve your vision," Himitsu muttered irritably._

_Naruto scowled at him slightly but allowed the man to trace a shape - possibly a kanji, he couldn't tell - out on Naruto's forehead. Himitsu placed his palm flat over the shape when he was done, and Naruto felt the faint buzz-burn of alien chakra on his skin and his own chakra automatically began to lash out at it, a reflex born from the Kyuubi's occasional invasions of his own chakra system. Luckily he managed to stop himself from destroying Himitsu's work._

_Naruto was pretty sure Himitsu would have given him an earful right there if they weren't both worrying about the kunai that were whistling towards them._

_"Fuck!" Naruto said loudly, and bent back in a painful way; he quelled the impulse to leap away, knowing that this would result in a painful smack against the rough cave wall. He could practically feel the kunai graze his stomach, and straightened back up; Himitsu, plastered against the wall, narrowed his eyes and ran out of the cave - though not before shoving Naruto back inside hard and barking out, "Don't get in the way!"_

_Disgruntled, Naruto struggled into an upright position. Like hell. Himitsu had just spent the past few hours, or however long they'd been in the cave, teaching him. It was time to put some of that knowledge to the test._

Naruto felt the long scar across his thigh that he'd gotten as a result of that particular bit of folly pulse in painful memory. He rubbed his leg, then halted when he realized that the others were slowing in front of him.

"We done?" he asked, not bothering to disguise or play up the hope in his voice. Just because he was relatively used to these extended trips didn't mean he liked them, after all.

"We should stop for the night." Sakura turned her head only slightly to answer him. Naruto could tell that Sasuke was scanning the trees with quick glances behind his mask, and realized that there was no birdsong, no noise but the wind. He cursed himself for being so caught up in the past that he ignored the present, and dropped to the ground cheerily.

"Excellent!"

Sakura threw him a look and he ignored it; Sasuke gave him a derisive stare and he ignored that, too. Just because they had been more alert than him didn't mean that they were any good at this "let's pretend we're not being watched" business. He started to set up their makeshift camp, and settled down on his bedroll, feeling an odd sense of deja vu. Nausea and grief rose in his throat like bile; he coughed and fumbled around with his pack for something to do. Genkaku sitting facing the trees Himitsu rolling his eyes on his pallet while he unrolled his scrolls and Tomo smiling at him, protecting him, screaming for him while he sat numbly in the stone cell, unable to help, unable to move, unable to even breathe.

"You done?" Sakura slung her pack down in front of him, letting it hit the ground with a deliberate thud. When he looked up, her green eyes were far too perceptive for his liking; he tried to think of what the old him would do in this situation, and grinned too broadly. She sat beside him.

"What's the matter, Sakura-chan?"

She tilted her head and casually draped a hand over her knee. His eyes darted to her fingers; as she lightly said, "Nothing," her fingers tapped out a code against her leg. He recognized it; Tomoko had used it all the time. They were unique to Konoha, but still just standard, Academy-taught signs. Sakura had probably not wanted to use the more advanced versions, not knowing whether or not Naruto knew them.

'Should we engage?' Sakura's fingers tapped, and Naruto made the sign for 'wait'. He frowned, trying to recall the code - he'd had more practice in reading it than actually using it, as his team had mostly used ANBU codes on the mission - and continued, 'Let them come to us'. Glancing over he saw Sasuke watching them. The Uchiha rolled his eyes, and lay back on his pack, mask still on, arm covering the eye-holes. Naruto could see his other hand fingering a kunai held within the shadows inside his bedroll, and grinned. Maybe Uchiha had some smarts left.

Sakura...not so much. She was wearing an expression typical of a rookie in a silent conversation; scrunched up face, narrowed eyes. She looked jumpy, too. He resisted the temptation to tell her to loosen up and look natural.****  
><strong>**

She hadn't changed much, still knew only how things worked in textbooks. Idiot. Who had decided to put someone like her, with no practical experience, in ANBU?

_Probably the same bastard who decided to shove me in Genkaku's team._

Naruto decided that someone definitely had it out for him, and leaned back against a tree. Looking at Sakura made his eyes itch, so he glanced away casually into the darkness of the trees. There was a flash of movement and something metallic glittered; Naruto felt a jolt of derision for the shinobi sloppy enough to let themselves be seen.

By the time the shinobi (Naruto wasn't quite sure how many of them there were, actually; more than two, less than five) had thrown their kunai the small clearing where Naruto and his teammates had set up camp, he was already perched on a tree - always keep yourself above the enemy - as was Sakura. Sasuke, the hot-headed idiot that he was, was still on the ground, engaging one of the enemy in a kenjutsu battle. Too bad Sasuke was winning, or he could have had another heap of ammunition right there.

He felt the absence of Sakura more than he felt her actually leaving. He glanced over, and she'd used her vanishing trick again, the one that she'd used against him when they had first sparred together after he'd come back. Approval flickered distantly - Sakura's taijutsu, while interesting and often useful, wasn't quite good enough for her to engage random enemies just like that without her first getting a measure of their style - while in the back of his mind he vaguely wondered exactly what it was; it wasn't genjutsu, for sure, and that was the most common way of doing such a thing. He put such musings aside for later, when there wasn't a fireball aimed directly for his face, and leaped out of the way.

_Sloppy_, he thought mildly, in the disconnected way that he always considered things in the middle of a fight. Now the trees would be on fire, and that wouldn't be helpful for anyone.

But the fire flickered out before it set the entire damned forest alight, and he made a mental note to figure out how to contain a katon jutsu like that, preferably without the use of some flashy suiton.

The enemy nin who'd tried to roast him snarled in frustration. Naruto mentally docked him several points for getting so riled up, and experimentally sent a kunai spinning towards the guy's skull. The man deflected with a handy pair of vambraces, which Naruto admired for a moment, and spun around, narrowing his eyes to see where Naruto was.

Someone behind him howled in pain. Automatically glancing to make sure it wasn't Sasuke or Sakura, he saw a thin woman bent over double, clutching at her stomach. When she straightened slowly, he saw that she had a shallow scratch on her belly, which had ripped through her clothes. This was no reason to be screaming so loudly.

He was getting less and less impressed with this little group, and took away seven points for unprofessionalism.

Then he saw the subtle bubbling around the cut, and almost laughed. Sakura was one vicious bitch when it came to her poisons. Amiably, he returned five of the lost points - but kept two for being hit by an enemy in clear sight - and then returned his attention to the opponent he was faced with.

The man was the thick, burly type who liked to growl a lot. Standard missing-nin fodder. A few nasty tricks and he thought he was up to par with Konoha ANBU. Naruto evaluated him for all of thirty seconds - muscle mass meant it would get tricky if the fight came to taijutsu, and he could already sense that the man was the type to try and get the battle over with as soon as possible. _No finesse,_ he thought. _Minus four._

He had already probably used his most powerful ninjutsu attack - that katon business that hadn't really worked - and would now go for hand-to-hand combat, bypassing genjutsu as being too fancy. This was an oversight practiced by many shinobi he had met. Genjutsu took time, delicacy, control; most people relegated it for covert or reconnaissance missions, and discounted it in the heat of battle.

Naruto smiled.

* * *

><p>Sasuke spun to avoid the thrust of his opponent's blade, and felt his lip curl in derision beneath his mask. The dull-eyed woman in front of him had skill and style, but her speed left much to be desired. He didn't even have to activate the sharingan to anticipate her moves at this point.<p>

He deflected an upper cut with a flick of his sword and sliced her collarbone as an afterthought. The ground was getting progressively muddier, and he frowned in irritation as his foot slid dangerously. Deciding that he'd played this game long enough, he leaned forward and bypassed her guard entirely, going under with the intention of carving out a slice of her intestines.

Instead, she jumped back, and Sasuke frowned. Despite her lanky build, she had seemed comfortable in close combat. So what was she planning now?

"This is the doton: chigi no fuuin," she smirked patronizingly, and Sasuke could have sworn she said it just loud enough for him to hear.

_Bitch_, he thought, and jumped forward. Or, more correctly, attempted to jump forward. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a repeating pattern of kanji in some deep brown material that he suspected was the very mud he had been creating covering his skin.

_Fuck,_ he thought._ Fuck, fuck, fuck._ He didn't know if he was hoping for one of the others to notice his predicament and help out, or was hoping that they would stay far, far away from him and his stupidity.

Figured that Naruto would be the one to notice. The infuriating blond sent him a creepy smirk before turning again to face the shinobi he had matched off against, some well-built idiot who kept on trying to engage Naruto in taijutsu and close-ranged weaponry. Naruto being the flighty bastard that he was kept dodging and jumping back, throwing a kunai or shuriken ever so often. Lazy asshole wasn't even fighting, not really. Sasuke would have ripped his throat out right there if he wasn't stuck in this stupid seal.

The smug bitch who'd stuck him in this mud crept closer, dull green eyes livening with triumph.

"Well, well, well," she murmured, and Sasuke had to bite back a comment about stereotypical villains and cliches, "Look at who we have here. It's the little Uchiha and his friends."

Sasuke would've recoiled if he'd been able to. Every other thought in his mind was eradicated by blind, unthinking panic, except for the one:

_How does she know who we are?_

* * *

><p><em>AN_: Chuugi (Sasuke) - loyalty

Ukime (Naruto) - bitter experience, grief, hardship, misery

Yotogi (Sakura) - watcher

"Doton: Chigi no Fuuin" - earth release: seal of the earth spirits

Be sure to review! Thanks.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter VI: Fine

* * *

><p>The woman's smile had twisted into something unreadable as she gazed at Sasuke.<p>

"I must admit," she murmured, "I had expected someone more... impressive."

Sasuke just stared at her, the insult barely registering behind the blind shock of _this was premeditated._

_Get a grip, Uchiha,_ he told himself firmly, and ignored her as she continued to speak.

Naruto had fucked off to toy with his opponent, and Sasuke couldn't see Sakura anywhere - though he could see the woman she'd been fighting clutching at her stomach while on her knees, evidently trying to keep her guts in and away from the acid eating at her skin. There was a blur of pink to his left and he saw Sakura fall on a man who had been standing slightly away from the battle, previously obscured and unnoticed. So she was out of the equation.

His gaze turned to Naruto, who was smirking as his opponent screamed and stood stock-still for evidently no reason at all. _Just kill him, you moron,_ thought Sasuke, morbidly fascinated by the shriek distorting the man's face. Looking back up, Sasuke met Naruto's unreadable gaze - then his focus snapped back to the bitch who had him trapped in front of her, as his mask was ripped off. His neck snapped forwards from the force of it, and he trapped a hiss behind his teeth.

She frowned, and pressed a gloved finger next to his left eye, prodding slightly. "How uninteresting they look," she mused, and Sasuke felt the realization flash through him. Of course. His sharingan.

Naruto had better fucking help him out before this lady removed his eyes and put them in a jar or something. He looked past her again, and saw Naruto watching him, looking resigned. He bristled. _Asshole._

A flash of movement and Naruto's screaming man suddenly had no windpipe left with which to scream. He fell to the ground, rigid, and Sasuke ceased to pay attention to him. Somewhere to his left, he heard Sakura's gasp as she was flung into something - probably a tree - and winced. But he couldn't worry about Sakura right now.

"Now, ladies." Naruto sauntered up to them. "This looks like an uncomfortable situation."

This time, Sasuke didn't bother to restrain his snarl.

Naruto's grin only widened. "Can't we all just be friends here?" he asked rhetorically, as something metallic in his hand flashed to the woman's neck.

She leaned back to avoid the blow and attempted to sweep her leg under in order to send him to the ground. Side-stepping this, Naruto grabbed her ankle and sent _her_ to the ground instead. She twisted away from him and whirled around, some sort of tag clutched loosely in her hand. Reaching out with the tag, she attempted to slap it onto his arm; he grabbed her hand by the wrist and twisted it until something popped. Loudly.

This was all getting dangerously close to where Sasuke was standing helplessly. He tried to flex his hands and felt the clay-like mud break a little; encouraged, he moved his fingers again. If he could just form a seal...

"Oi, you useless Uchiha, start with the weakest point and then move on. Don't get hasty - do it one section at a time," Naruto instructed briefly before launching a volley of high-speed kunai at the enemy kunoichi.

Sasuke stared for a second, then gritted his teeth. He could've slapped himself for the oversight, but for now he crushed angry retorts in his mouth and concentrated, grimly. He could feel the weak point in the web of chakra binding him; he bore his entire chakra against it, feeling it splinter under his focus.

_Hah,_ he thought, then grimly turned his attention to the next spot.

Well, it looked like Uchiha was taking some good advice, for once in his life.

The woman's eyes flickered back behind him to watch Sasuke. _Bad idea,_ he thought. _Didn't you learn to always keep your eyes on the opponent?_ He docked eight points for such a stupid mistake, and then sent her spinning to the ground with a punch to the face. She lay there, dazed, for a second, with blood beginning to trickle out of her nose - then she tried to get up again.

Naruto folded to half-kneel on the ground, one knee pressed into her stomach, the other put up and supporting his arm. She wheezed as he increased the pressure on her stomach, and raised a sluggish arm to do... something. He wasn't quite sure what her intention was, other than feebly batting him away, but he pinned her arm to the ground and shoved a kunai through her wrist anyways. There was a brief resistance before sinew and bone gave way; blood began to pool in her palm and around her hand, and she opened her mouth to scream.

"Shut up," he said, and felt a flare of satisfaction when she cut herself off and merely gargled a pained moan. "Better."

There was a crash to his left and he glanced over. It was Sakura, pinning the other guy to the ground with her knees. As he watched, she deftly drew a senbon lightly across the guy's throat. She had only broken the skin as far as he could tell, but the guy's ensuing choking sounds said otherwise. She left him there, immobilized, and limped over to where Sasuke was just beginning to move again, and Naruto was leaning over the woman.

Her green gaze flicked to the woman's impaled wrist, and then to Naruto's bland face.

She swallowed and said nothing. Naruto smiled in approval and let his grip on her other arm go. The limb flopped uselessly to the ground, and he shoved a kunai between her splayed fingers as a reminder.

"Now," he said pleasantly. "We're going to play nice, right?" He leaned in closer. "I heard what you said to him. You know who we are. Why don't you tell us how you came by that information, hm?"

He was completely fucking insane, Sakura decided. Before she had just thought Naruto was _partially_ crazy, but...

She stared at the blood-streaked metal jutting proudly out of the mangled mess of the unknown woman's wrist. And she felt, just for a second, the stirrings of pity.

She crushed the emotion immediately. _She would've killed Sasuke,_ she reminded herself. _She _could_ have. But Naruto stopped her._

Sakura cleared her throat and said, "If you're going to interrogate her, make sure she doesn't bleed out." It was a feeble excuse. All she really wanted was no longer have to see a kunai shoved through someone's arm and into the dirt.

Naruto gave her a calm look and said flatly, "The blade is slowing the blood flow." He turned his attention back to the woman, and moved her hair off her sweaty face in a gesture that was a parody of gentleness.

"So," he said, "let's start with your name." His hand went to hover over the kunai, just barely. The woman saw the movement, and her eyes widened impossibly further. She spouted a string of numbers, and Naruto's smile grew icy.

"No," he said, and used three fingers to twist the blade ever-so-slightly. The woman's face grayed, and Sakura felt sick. When she looked over, Sasuke was standing above all three of them, arms crossed, face unreadable. He didn't meet her gaze.

"Tukiyo," she spat out. If Naruto had expected the name to be familiar, he showed no signs.

"That wasn't so hard, now, was it? Now, next question. Where are you from, Tukiyo?"

Her gaze darted around, and she licked her lips nervously. When a minute passed without an answer, Naruto sighed, and jostled the kunai in her arm roughly.

Tukiyo passed out.

Naruto looked at Sakura and said, "Bring her back."

Sakura thought about refusing for half a second, then decided that she _really_ didn't want to get on this Naruto's bad side. She reached out and pressed two fingers to the woman's sweaty temple, finding the right place to jolt her back to consciousness.

"Sorry about that," Naruto apologized, removing a senbon from his belt. "It was clumsy. You require a delicate touch, right?"

Very carefully, he dragged the senbon in a curved line just beneath her eye. Blood sprung up, washed away by the automatic tears that sprung up with a foreign object so close to her eyes.

"This is all I have with me now, but we'll have to make do. I'm sure you have no objection." The senbon hovered just above her darting eye. "So. I was asking you where you're from." Panic had blown up her pupils until there was only a thin ring of lighter black around them.

"Please," she said, helplessly. Sakura felt bile in her throat. Naruto traced a glittering red curve beneath her other eye, and shook his head, smiling.

She closed her eyes.

"R - " She cut off, freezing in place. Even her fingers stopped twitching. Naruto suddenly pried open her jaw, knocking her out when it seemed her teeth were going to close down on his fingers, and Sakura caught a brief glimpse of what looked like lines tattooed onto the woman's tongue.

Naruto snarled in frustration, the only display of real emotion he'd given since the battle had begun, and, shoving her head back to expose her neck, slit her throat with a harsh motion.

"What are you doing?" Sakura demanded. "Is that it?"

Naruto turned to her, fixing her with a furious gaze. "That's all I needed to know."

Sakura said nothing, and as Naruto began to collect the bodies and pile them up in the center of what had been their camp, she tried not to think too hard about the red she had seen bleeding into his eyes as he looked at her.

Silently, they had gone about disposing of the bodies. Sasuke had incinerated them with a katon, not needing the prompting given by Naruto's flat gaze. Sasuke sealed the area with chakra to make sure that the flames wouldn't spread anywhere else (something which made Naruto perk up with something like interest in his eerie - _calm too calm -_ eyes), and they had left before the skin had a chance to sizzle off the bodies.

* * *

><p>And yet, even with the crisp smell of tree-laden night, Sasuke could almost feel the heavy stench of melting flesh when he inhaled.<p>

Thinking about it too hard left him nauseated, though. They continued on for hours; Naruto seemed driven by something Sasuke couldn't see, Sakura looked like she was racing to put as many miles between them and the old campsite as possible, and Sasuke just felt like if he stopped moving, he might actually have a chance to think about what just happened - specifically, what had happened with Naruto.

He did not want that chance.

When they stopped, it was dawn, and they had reached a small village. Light had barely brushed against the firmly closed wooden shutters of the houses when they arrived, and the air was still cold and dewy.

"Might as well sleep in a proper bed while we can," Naruto remarked. "Fake names, take off your hitai-ate and hide your weapons. And _please _tell me you brought civilian clothes."

Sasuke didn't have the energy to respond to this in his usual scathing manner. He brushed past Naruto, swinging a cloak around him to disguise his bone-colored ANBU armour and walking into the nearest inn.

The man behind the desk looked at them for a long, silent moment before he took their money, and Sasuke wondered if he had blood on his face or something. They got one room because no one wanted to go over the mission budget and get their pay docked (getting more than one room would have made it extremely difficult to buy food, and Sasuke didn't much care where he slept anyways. He'd take the floor.)

Sakura called the first shower, and he sat in the close of the room with Naruto, who was standing by the half-open window and looking restless. Sakura had healed most of their serious wounds, but there was a minor cut on his cheek which had reopened somewhere along the way, and was bleeding sluggishly. Naruto wiped the blood off when the drips reached his mouth, and licked the blood from his fingers in an absent, detached way that made Sasuke shudder. Naruto turned his head to look at him suddenly, and Sasuke glanced away, feeling nausea rise once more.

Sakura exited the shower and made Naruto wait outside the door while she changed. Sasuke took the opportunity to step into the steamed-up bathroom, and peeled off his ANBU uniform, mouth tightening as he pulled it away from his wounds. The bleeding had stuck the uniform to his body.

He balled up the bloody mess and tossed it into a corner of the bathroom, then stepped into the shower. Sakura had used all the hot water, so he had to make do with the face-numbing trickle of cold. There was no shampoo, and only a small sliver of soap. He washed his hair with it three times, and the water came out pinkish each time.

There was only the one towel, which Sakura had taken, so he banged on the door until she opened it a crack and threw the towel at him. He looked at the damp, slightly bloody cloth and sighed.

Sakura was lying on the bed, face down, when he came out of the bathroom and Naruto was standing by the window again. Naruto went into the bathroom without looking at anyone, and Sasuke cleared his throat for Sakura to leave; she pulled the covers over her head and made no other response, so he changed with her in the room, keeping a wary eye on her covered head. He sat down on the other bed, pressing his back against the wooden headboard and feeling the bruise, from where the clay had pressed against his spine, bloom to painful life. He focused on the dull throb.

Sakura removed the blankets and turned her head to look at him. Her one green eye glittered in the half-shadows of the room; Sasuke avoided her gaze.

"Are we going to do something about him?" Her voice, when it broke the silence, was hoarse.

Sasuke snorted without looking at her. "What do you mean? We're certainly not going to kill him and dump him in the woods, Sakura. He did nothing to jeopardise the mission. I don't see why you're making a fuss."

She sat up completely, looking outraged. "I don't see why you're _not_! You can't pretend that what he did was _normal_, Sasuke."

"Oh, so you think Anko or Kakashi would've done anything different?"

"Normal for _Naruto_. He would never have done something like that before - "

"Well, looks like it's normal now. People change, Sakura. Three years, remember?"

She looked at him, her mouth drawn tight. "People don't change _that _much."

He didn't respond, and after a moment Naruto came out of the bathroom. He crouched down in his towel next to his pack, and pulled out some civilian clothes; Sasuke left before he started to actually change in front of them, and Sakura pulled the blankets over her head again.

Sasuke, left aimlessly standing in the hallway, wandered downstairs in search of something to distract himself with. He paused in front of the woven screen that covered the kitchen doorway, and smelled cooking meat and dead animal. He left the inn, walking to the village limits, and crouching down on a fallen log, rubbing the slick moss that had grown on the partially rotted wood. His mind felt like a blur of white noise; his attention shifted from the sound of a bird in a tree, moving water somewhere to his left, the shift of shadows as a small animal moved in the bushes to his left.

Leaning back, Sasuke closed his eyes and attempted to focus. It wasn't like he'd never seen anyone killed before. It wasn't like he'd never seen anyone tortured - as torture sessions went, that was mild. But it wasn't the image of the gray-faced woman that appeared, lined with white, whenever he closed his eyes; it was Naruto's bloody, unscarred fingers gently twisting the cold metal in her arm.

He was being unprofessional. Any more time spent thinking like this and he'd turn into Sakura.

* * *

><p>Sakura rubbed at her temples fruitlessly as she struggled to ward off the incoming migraine.<p>

They were around ten feet away from the stupid plant they'd been sent to collect. When briefed about their mission, Sakura had listened to the description with no small amount of incredulity: her first ANBU mission, and she was sent to go retrieve a few shrubs? Chuunin - no, _genin_ could do that much.

But she'd held in her complaints. ANBU was, after all, a specialized division; many such divisions had their own initiation rituals, their own unspoken rules. As hazing went, this wasn't so bad.

Except for this _damned_ plant.

It possessed an exceedingly odd sense of... _awareness_. It had already almost chopped Naruto's arm when he'd gotten too close to it, and Sakura had just finished healing the thin gash on Sasuke's forehead that had been pouring blood into his eye. They had all agreed to retreat and figure out a way to cut off one of the fucking thing's leaves before another stray, senbon-like needle came flying out of the plant's thick base and into someone's unsuspecting eye. Sasuke in particular had gone rather green at this prospect.

"Alright," Sakura finally said, putting her fingers down and drawing a kunai absently, "we clearly need to go into this with a strategy. Attacking it on the fly doesn't seem to do much good."

Naruto was staring at the plant and evidently not paying much attention to her.

"Ukime!" she said sharply, and he batted a hand in her direction. She repressed the urge to cut it off.

"Shh," he whispered, eyes wide and unfocused, "maybe it can hear us." And, Sakura discovered when she glanced at it, it had swiveled all of its noxious-colored flowers around to face them. She gave Naruto another look and wondered uneasily if the plant had somehow drugged him; he looked rather feverish.

She put this out of her mind as a complication she didn't want to deal with - as long as he could throw a kunai in a straight line and didn't start raving, she didn't care what he did - and snapped her half-gloved fingers in front of Sasuke's nose. He jerked out of his daze and glared.

"No one's plucking out your precious eyes, Chuugi, so quit brooding about it and help me figure this thing out," she said crisply. He muttered something that she ignored in favor of focusing on the plant.

The thick stem was just thicker than a human thigh, and stood four feet straight up from the ground. In addition to the stalks upon which the bile-colored flowers bobbed, the whole thing was around six feet tall. The flowers themselves looked a bit like withered sunflowers, only their color was tainted a bit greenish, and the center the exact same shade as the petals. In the stem there were hundreds of tiny holes, out of which needles apparently shot (much to everyone's surprise, as no one had in fact been informed of this particular detail. There were some really vicious people working in ANBU's administrative department.) And below this was a thick pile of roots which extended into the ground - Sakura didn't want to consider whether or not those things moved, or how deep they went. She made herself think about it anyways.

Then she turned her head and looked at her boys. Sasuke was eyeing the tree like it had given personal insult against his family, and Naruto's gaze had gone completely diffuse.

"So," she said, making her voice hard and loud, "can we see any of its weak spots?"

"Just above the roots," said Sasuke, referring to a place where the stem was slightly thinner than otherwise, "and those flowers. I bet if we cut them off it'll be left floundering."

"The flowers are a more feasible option," Sakura agreed.

"We could burn the whole thing up," Naruto suggested, an odd light in his eyes. Sakura thought uneasily about the kinds of poisonous vapors that might emerge from the thing, and vetoed that idea. She didn't want whatever had gotten into Naruto getting into either of them.

"Chopping off the flowers it is?" she asked, and Sasuke nodded decisively. They got up, and fanned out to either side; somewhere behind her, she heard Naruto muttering petulantly about wanting to use his new katon that he'd copied from Sasuke, and sighed.

Thirty-six minutes later they were back, huddled in the bushes, considerably worse for wear. Sakura wearily inspected the thin bruise that twined around her arm - the thing apparently had _vines_, too - and Naruto was gingerly poking the newly-healed skin on his stomach. He had normalized somewhere in between Sasuke's stray katon (that had missed its mark completely), and the plant actually catching Sakura's kunai and tossing it back at her.

Sakura leaned her head back against the tree trunk. Naruto lifted his gaze and looked first at her, then the plant.

"Yotogi," he said, "I'm surprised at you. Don't you know any of this thing's special weaknesses, or anything like that?"

She scowled at him. "And why, dumbfuck, would I know anything like that?"

"...Because you're a med-nin? Isn't it half of your job to know shit like this?"

She shifted uncomfortably, then stopped when it sent a line of pain shooting through her thigh. She gritted her teeth, trying not to make a sound, and snapped, "I'm a doctor, not a fucking herbologist, okay?"

"Not a word," said Sasuke absently, focused on the plant.

"What?"

"Herbologist. It isn't a word."

She told him to go fuck himself, then tried to get up, ignoring the pain in her leg.

"So, besides putting all the weight on me - anybody else have any ideas?"

"Yeah," said Naruto, standing slowly, "how about you use all your hard-won knowledge and enlighten us as to what the hell this thing is?"

"Look, asshat - " she began, but he cut her off.

"You're the one always lording your smarts over the rest of us, right? Let's see 'em, Sakura. And don't give me that 'herbologist' crap. I know that this is part of your job, okay? You need to know this shit for when we're in situations like this."

"Herbalist," murmured Sasuke, but no one paid any attention.

"Who the hell are you? Team leader? I'm not some subordinate you can chastise, okay? Why don't you tell me what the plant is?"

"Not my job to know that," he said steadily.

"Piss off with your 'jobs'. We're a damn team; just because I'm a med-nin doesn't give you the right to tell me what I should know!"

"Actually, not knowing your shit gives me the right to say whatever the fuck I want."

"Fuck off, Ukime. You're so learned with your three-year long mission and your ANBU team, why don't you tell me something about the stupid plant, since you obviously know _so_ much more than me!"

Naruto shifted away from her slightly. "Don't make this personal," he said, with far less conviction than he had spoken with before.

Encouraged, Sakura continued along this vein. "Really? 'Cause it seems like you just got pretty damn personal back there, telling me how to do my own fucking job. Come on, Ukime, open up! Share all your wonderful experiences with us; we all want to know what special thing it is that you saw. Do you think I haven't noticed how you've been acting? All solitary and holier-than-thou - get over yourself."

Sasuke leaned against a tree, arms folded, watching the fight with interest, flicking glances at the plant every so often. He snickered quietly at Sakura's last comment.  
>Naruto gave him a glance full of poison. "Now, now, Yotogi-chan," he said, "Jealousy ain't nice. Sorry I left your sorry ass in Konoha - I kind of expected you to have <em>learned<em> something while I was gone, but guess not." He smirked. "Still weaker than everybody else, and now even your brains are worthless to everyone. I had hoped that you'd be something _other_ than dead weight on this mission but..." He shrugged, and Sakura's vision pulsed for a second.

When Naruto turned around to face the plant again, Sakura practically heard something in her head snap. Something in her took over for a second, and then next thing she knew she was staring into Naruto's startled blue eyes. She distantly registered that somewhere along the line, she had grabbed his shoulders and shoved him against a tree. There was a senbon in her hand, and the rational part of her hoped it wasn't _too_ poisonous.

"Weak?" she said, and threw him into another tree. He made a dent in the trunk and wheezed, sliding down against the ground. He made as if to pick himself up, and she grabbed him again, this time by the neck.

"Worthless?" The plant was somewhere behind her. She whirled him around and planted her foot in the middle of his back; he stumbled practically into the plant, which snaked out pale vines to grab at his arms. He snarled and cut them off him, darting out of range and turning to face her, face white and eyes narrowed. He straightened from his bent-over position without any of the difficulty which should have been there, from Sakura's foot in his back and fist in his stomach.

"You - " he started, but was cut off by ducking the flurry of senbon aimed at his face. So he couldn't be hurt easily? That just gave her more chances to try.

* * *

><p>Sasuke watched Naruto and Sakura fight from the safe distance of twenty feet away. More accurately, he watched Sakura pummel Naruto and the other desperately try to regain his balance. Sasuke hoped she wouldn't give him even the smallest chance to catch his breath; right now, Sakura's tenuous advantage depended on Naruto being disoriented. If he got his bearings, the fight would not go so well for her. He watched his teammate get flung into yet another tree, and wished that he had popcorn.<p>

Sakura flung Naruto down, and there was a sickening pop. His arm was flung out at an odd angle; Sasuke frowned slightly, and started forward. Keeping his hands held out in front of him, he approached Sakura cautiously. She was breathing hard, hair stuck to her face and neck, eyes narrowed.

"Sakura," he said. Her head whipped up. "I think he gets it."

Naruto wheezed, and began to lift himself up. Sakura planted a foot into his back and shoved him down again.

"He definitely gets it," muttered Sasuke, staring at the rather pathetic form of Naruto.

"He better," she hissed, and with one final kick to the ribs, stalked off in the opposite direction. Sasuke let her go, approaching Naruto and kneeling at his side, face carefully devoid of expression.

"Need a hand?" he asked. Naruto rolled over, inhaled, began to cough, and glared when Sasuke repressed a smile. He shook his head minutely, and stared hard at the branches above him. Sasuke watched with concealed glee.

After a few silent minutes where Naruto breathed deeply and Sasuke tried not to laugh, Naruto sat up, a surprisingly smooth motion. Sasuke stopped biting back mirth and stared. Naruto half-smirked at him, took a few more deep breaths, then stood without apparent difficulty. He walked off in the direction Sakura had taken, without a backward glance at Sasuke, who was still kneeling, dumbfounded.

Sakura's back was ramrod straight as Naruto approached it. She was sitting, cross-legged, with her hands open on her knees and her eyes closed. She tensed when he came closer, but did nothing else.

_Alright_, Naruto thought, crouching down and then sitting on his ankles. The ground was muddy here, and he felt it leech the warmth from his knees. _Simple. Just need to apologize and pacify her. I don't want an angry Sakura trying to rip out my spinal cord in my sleep for the rest of the mission. Just... say sorry._

He opened his mouth.

"Don't bother," Sakura said, eyes finally opening. "I know you meant it."

Naruto tried to smile, and failed miserably. "I was just...irritated."

"Yeah," she said flatly. "I know. It's fine, Ukime. Just stay out of my way, and I'll stay out of yours."

Naruto gave a quiet sigh. "Let's just kill the damn plant and get back home." As he stood up and turned around to face the plant again, he muttered under his breath so neither of his teammates could hear, "It's not fine..."

_It will never be fine._


End file.
